


The Bullet Catch

by CyanideBreathmint



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Gen, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2010-12-04
Updated: 2012-09-04
Packaged: 2017-10-13 12:39:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 34,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/137452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CyanideBreathmint/pseuds/CyanideBreathmint
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the fic I’ve spent 50k words winding up to – Eames and Arthur finally enact their mission of payback, but to get to their targets they have to go through the Russian mafia first.<br/>Warnings: Gentlemen, behold! Gun porn! Graphic descriptions of unpleasant things happening to people; psych issues (PTSD is serious business), high-octane nightmare fuel, drug use, general underworld seediness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> This one is definitely part of the _Parlor Tricks_ timeline, along with _The French Drop._ Definite references to the prequel comic, _The Cobol Job._ Words in  < > brackets denote conversation taking place in a language other than English that the POV character does in fact understand. Thank you to [skiriki](http://skiriki.livejournal.com/) and [stella_polaris](http://stella-polaris.livejournal.com/) for the Finn-picking and to [heronymus_waat](http://heronymus-waat.livejournal.com/) for the beta.

Christian’s cell phone buzzed softly in his shirt pocket, but he ignored it and concentrated on the conversation he was having over the phone handset he had wedged between his ear and right shoulder.

<“So, a dozen red roses for pickup tonight at six,”> he murmured at the customer on the other end. <“That’s going to be a little difficult seeing as we close at four today.”> He listened patiently to the man’s pleas and frowned a little, and then gave ground.

<“Okay, it’ll be close, but we can have the flowers put together by five if we hurry. Just call us before you pick up so we can actually let you in if we’ve locked up before. And you want a card with those?”>

He put down the details of the order on a note pad in his messy left-handed scrawl. _Mä rakastan sua_ , the note had said, _I love you_ in Finnish. He half-smiled to himself as he took down the payment details and then waited politely for the click on the other end, and dropped the handset into the phone cradle. He then reached into his jacket and checked the text message. English, which meant it had come from Yusuf, as that was the only language they had in common.

 _E and A are here with their architect. Picked one up in Paris._

That made things easier now that the others had found a trustworthy architect for the job, and he made a mental note to have accommodations set up for the additional team member. He ripped the notepaper from the pad and put it in the folder that the florists put all their order sheets in, and then ran his fingers through his messy blond hair as he got up from his chair. _My roots are showing,_ he thought, _need a new bleach job._

<“Hey, Marjut,”> he called into the back of the shop, where one of the other florists was working, <“We’ve got another rush order. Someone forgot his wedding anniversary was tonight and he wants a dozen red roses for pickup before six. Details are in the order sheet as usual. Remember that I’m on leave from tomorrow on, so make sure your mother remembers and doesn’t try to call me when I don’t show up.”>

< _“Joo,”_ > she said, her voice thin from distance and inattention as she worked on a wedding bouquet, a tightly packed arrangement of peace roses, buds creamy white with pink-flushed petal tips. <“Have fun on your holiday, _svensson._ ”>

He smiled thinly at the gentle jibe, picked up his messenger bag from behind the counter and left the florist’s shop without another word. The small bells tied to the door handle chimed softly as it swung shut behind him. Chances were that he would never see this place again, but he did not look back as he walked out into the late afternoon sunlight. He shivered despite the late spring warmth and frowned at the panic that he felt swelling in his breast, crowding the breath out of him. It could have been excitement, he thought, now that the plan he had spent three years working on was coming together, but he was no longer very good at telling terror and joy apart. He pulled out a prescription pill bottle from a pocket, dry-swallowed a clonazepam just in case.

A gentle breeze ruffled his hair, tugged at the loose fabric of his outsize shirt, and he smiled with a wild, bittersweet joy when the gravity of the moment finally registered through the benzodiazepines. _Eames and Arthur are in Helsinki with their architect._

Three years. Christian was no longer the same man he had been three years ago, and he wondered idly how much Eames had changed, if at all. He thought of their last bitter argument, the finality of the door slamming and felt the feelings in his gut shiver into some kind of resolution. He picked the feelings apart with the dull detachment that the medication afforded him and identified panic; fear laced with guilt and unease as he reached into his left trouser pocket and brushed his fingertips against the handle of the pruning knife he carried habitually.

 _Not long before this is all over,_ he thought as he headed back home to wait for Arthur’s phone call. _I’ve been waiting long enough for this._


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [This video](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLwvRCncpic) shows Helsinki in the time of year I'm writing in, and the song is pretty lyrically appropriate for the story, too. (Link goes to YouTube, lyrics in Finnish.)

Eames had made a point of avoiding Helsinki in the past three and a half years of his life. That he was still part owner of a pleasant little house in the postwar suburbs outside the inner city was no real incentive to go back, not after the betrayal and anguish that had prompted the breakup in the first place. He had studiously avoided all news of his ex, and the last that he had heard of Christian was that he had been burned badly on a job in Dubai and vanished from the extraction scene shortly afterwards. He had not probed for more information; he had not wanted to disturb the fragile peace he had achieved since he had packed his bags and left the flat they had shared in London for good.

The neighborhood had not changed much in the past few years and he hesitated as he stood on the front step, knuckles curled as though to knock on the front door. A few minutes stretched by and he let his hand fall to his side. He had been about to turn around go back to the hotel when the bolt in the door clicked. It swung inwards to reveal a sliver of face, olive-green eyes glancing curiously out at him.

“It’s been a long three years, Chris,” Eames said, looking up at him. He was thinner, the angles of his face sharper, framed by hair that was longer than it had ever been, but the height and the cold smile were still there, as was the messy side part.

“I can’t say I haven’t missed you, Michael,” Christian said softly. There was a catch in his voice like a broken nail. “Come on in,” he murmured softly before he stepped away from the door. Eames stepped over the threshold into the house and stopped short as he got a proper look at Christian now that the door was no longer in his way. He looked as though he had lost twenty or thirty pounds – weight that he didn’t have to spare in the first place, but what hurt the most to see was the split titanium hook that stuck out of his right sleeve and the faded scar in the hollow of his throat, one the exact size and shape of a cigarette burn.

“Was that what happened to you in Dubai?” Eames managed to ask after the door shut behind him. He knew he was staring, but could not help himself, and it took an effort of will to stifle the horror and fascination and look away from the prosthetic.

“Among other things, yes,” Christian said softly. Something flickered in his eyes but was immediately swallowed and filmed over with a frozen smile that was all too familiar. Eames felt a soft bumping sensation against his ankle then and he looked down to find an overweight gray cat butting its head against his ankle.

“Oscar,” Eames whispered, smiling reflexively as he knelt down to pat the cat on the head. “I didn’t think you were one for pets, let alone one you had to ship back from London.”

“It isn’t every day you wake up naked with an empty bottle of Finlandia in one hand, a gun you don’t recall owning in the other, and a kitten sleeping on your chest,” Christian said, and the mention of Finnish vodka was enough to give Eames a sympathetic hangover as it was. “I felt it was an omen, so I brought him back with me when I moved back here after you left. This house is too quiet as it is.”

“About that, I’m –” Eames started to say.

“Don’t apologize, Michael,” Christian said, his irritation apparent in the too-careful enunciation he used every time he had to express frustration in English. “I lied to you not just once but repeatedly over many months. You had every right to pack your bags and walk away after you learned the truth.”

“I still feel like a right bastard for what I did, though,” Eames said with a half-shrug.

“Same here.” They shared a soft rueful chuckle at that, and then Christian stepped away from the doorway and waved Eames in the vague direction of the kitchen. He slipped off his shoes, mindful of Finnish etiquette, and then followed Christian into the kitchen with Oscar at his heels.

“How did you know I was here before I knocked?” Eames looked around and smiled quietly to himself at the choice of furniture, the framed photographs on the walls. His last memories of this house had been of the tour the real estate agent had given them before they had bought it, two months before their final argument. The rooms had been hushed, empty and waiting patiently for the quiet chaos of domestic life.

“Arthur called me earlier and told me you’d left the hotel without telling him where you were going, and there was really one place we both thought you’d be, so I waited for you to show up.” Christian didn’t wait for Eames to pull up a chair and sit down at the kitchen table – he turned instead to the stove and put a kettle on for tea, one that Eames recognized as the one he had left behind in London. It felt strange watching him now that his body language had changed to compensate for the missing hand, like a familiar street with its landmarks rearranged.

“Arthur told me you were working at a florist’s shop now,” Eames said when Christian sat down opposite him after he had put the kettle on. The light slanting in through the windows put him in mind of a modern-day Vermeer. Soup simmered quietly in a large enameled pot on the range, and it smelled very good.

“It’s something to do now I’m retired. I would go insane if I just sat around all day.” Christian pursed his lips thoughtfully, glanced at the many prescription pill bottles lined up in a neat row on the table. “More insane, I mean.”

“How many medications are you on, exactly?” Eames asked. He picked up one of the pill bottles, glanced at its contents. He didn’t recognize the name on the label or the pills themselves, but he spotted the word clonazepam on the labeling. _Klonopin. That is a lot of anti-anxiety medication,_ he thought, before he put the bottle back down on the table.

“Less than I used to do. I used to swallow clonazepam like _Turkinpippuri.”_ Christian said, referring to a Finnish candy flavored with ammonium chloride. Eames hated those fiery little liquorices; he felt that they had always tasted like a cough drop came in his mouth.

“I just wish I’d been able to stop you before all this happened.” Eames shook his head as Christian got up to take the whistling kettle off the stove and looked down at his own hands, wondered what it would be like to lose one of them. He had always been able to project himself into someone else’s shoes and forge them in dreams, but maiming and disability had always held a personal horror for him.

There was a soft gurgle as Christian poured hot water from the kettle into a teapot. “You did try to warn me, yes,” he said after he had started the tea steeping, “but I take comfort in knowing that I am not the only fool who decided it was a good idea at the time, even if Arthur has gotten off better than I have.”

“Arthur is good,” Eames agreed.

“Still the best in the business.” Christian put the kettle down on a potholder and set two mugs down on the table, checked a cell phone that he pulled out of a pocket. “He just sent me a text message. Everyone should be here in time for dinner.”

“Good. Then we can start talking business,” Eames said as he accepted one of the empty mugs and looked down at his reflection in the bottom while he waited for the tea to steep. He could not imagine living with the change in identity that came from losing a hand, nor the sense of violation that would come every time he looked down at the stump.

“Indeed,” Christian smiled gently as he sat back down, but the smile did not reach his eyes. Eames knew that expression well from the time they had been together, and he knew that people usually ended up bleeding afterwards.

 

* * *

Dinner turned out to be _lohikeitto_ – a Finnish cream-based salmon and potato soup – as Eames found out when the others arrived in time for dinner. Christian shooed him out of the kitchen after he had returned from letting them in. “Go and sit with the others while I finish up in here,” he had said while he poached chunks of fresh salmon in the simmering broth. “It shouldn’t take more than ten or fifteen minutes.”

“You don’t need any help here?” Eames asked, a little doubtfully.

“I have coped fairly well without you in the past three years. I doubt this will change in the next fifteen minutes,” Christian said a little testily. “Get out of my kitchen, Michael, before I make you.” This, too, was something familiar, and Eames smiled wistfully to himself as he collected his mug of tea and beat a hasty retreat out of the kitchen.

He found Yusuf fussing over Oscar in the living room. Ariadne flipped idly through the large photo album on the coffee table and glanced up at him when he came in.

“Maybe you should have told us where you were going before you left,” she said. “I started getting nervous after I woke up from my nap and found Arthur making phone calls because you were gone.”

“It’s sweet of you to be worried, Ariadne, but Finland is one of the safest countries in the world, and I can take care of myself,” he said as he sat down beside her on the sofa. She patted him carefully on the arm and put the photo book back down, mindful of the coffee cups. “Where’s Arthur?” he asked, directing his question at either or both of them.

“I don’t know,” Ariadne said doubtfully. “He told Yusuf to bring me here to meet you, and he said he’d be here later.”

“He told me he was meeting Nicole,” Yusuf said with a significant glance over his cup of coffee, and Oscar leapt off his lap to climb up onto the sofa between Eames and Ariadne. She raised a brow at Yusuf’s cryptic statement, curiosity plain in her face. Hidden behind that was a hint of insecurity; Eames could tell that she was not yet sure enough of herself to actually be jealous.

“Do you remember the blonde I forged when we taught you to fight in hand-to-hand?” he asked her gently, in an attempt to alleviate her unease.

“His ex, I believe,” Ariadne said with a slow nod. “Then you forged somebody else.”

“That woman would be Nicole. She’s a forger, one of the better ones, and she still works for intel back in the US.”

“You trained her,” Ariadne said as she put two and two together. “That’s how you knew her well enough to forge her.”

“Very astute,” Eames said with a nod. “I doubt she’s competition if that’s what you’re worried about. If she knew too much about what he did professionally she’d have to tell her superiors, and they have an arrangement about that.” Ariadne blushed and found a sudden interest in her cuticles, and he smiled to see her slight discomfort. He had always thought her rather charming.

“I am not sure I’m comfortable with any kind of official involvement in this situation,” Yusuf said carefully as he picked Oscar’s long gray hairs off the weave of his trousers.  
“In other circumstances I’d be uncomfortable too, but there were some complications back in Singapore that made us decide to make contact with, shall I say, more official channels,” Eames explained.

“Considering _your_ relationship with your former employers,” Yusuf said with a wide smile, “whatever we are going into must be dire indeed.” Ariadne looked up, slightly alarmed at that.

“Whatever we’re going into is important enough that they’ve chosen to disregard the packet of information my attorney is holding for release in the event of my untimely death.” Eames glanced meaningfully at her as he said that, and she held his gaze with a vague trepidation. Unlike Arthur he believed that she would probably be able to handle the intrigue and violence that they were heading straight into, but it didn’t stop him from worrying anyway.

 

* * *

Amazing smells issued forth from the kitchen when Christian ushered them into the dining room. He had, in the time the fish was poaching in the soup, also set the dining table for four. Ariadne ran a fingertip along the extravagantly figured table runner as she explored her place setting. “Is this recycled kimono silk?” she asked.

“I believe it is,” Eames said as he recognized the fabric from a minor dispute they had had in the past. “You bought this in New York, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Christian said with a wry smile. “Then I brought it back to your flat in London and we found out it was too long for your table.”

“So you got a larger table when you furnished this house despite the fact that you live alone,” Yusuf said after Christian had served everyone present.

“In my defense I was expecting not to live alone when I ordered this table,” Christian shrugged, sat down at his own place to Ariadne’s right. “After things changed it felt like a shame to let this fabric go to waste so I did not cancel the order.”

 

* * *

Dinner was excellent, as Eames expected it to be, and the soup was just as he remembered from the last time Christian had made it when they still lived together in London. The potato was just soft enough, the salmon delicately poached and seasoned with masses of fresh dill. Too much had changed, most of it for the worse, but it reassured him that this had not. Arthur showed up halfway through the meal with a bottle of wine in a gift bag. Christian let him in the back door and sat him down as the others were eating.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” Arthur said. “You don’t have to get me anything if there isn’t anything left.”

“Not a problem.” Christian set Arthur’s place at the table and then ladled him some soup. “I’m lazy enough that I like to cook enough to last me through the weekend.”

“I don’t understand why people complain about Finnish food,” Yusuf said as he wiped at his bowl with a buttered slice of rye bread. “Everything I have had here has been excellent.”

“That is because Chirac and Berlusconi are full of – nonsense,” Christian said, mindful of Ariadne’s presence at the table.

“You don’t have to mind your language around me,” Ariadne said with a slight smile. “I’m an architect. I probably swear as much as a sailor."

“Ah, but do you swear as much as a chef?” Christian asked as he pulled the bottle of wine from the bag and read its label as he sat back down in his chair. “ _Grythyttan Hjortron_. Excellent taste, Arthur.”

“I start shouting like Gordon Ramsay if my model buildings don’t come out right, if that’s what you mean,” she said. Eames nearly choked on a piece of potato then and covered his consternation with a hasty sip of water.

“Is something wrong?” Ariadne asked, putting her spoon down.

“I’m just not used to the mental image of you swearing like Gordon Ramsay, love,” Eames said after another sip of water.

“You haven’t spent enough time around art majors, then,” Arthur said as he buttered a slice of rye bread. “The only time someone with any kind of formal art education doesn’t swear is when they’re teaching but don’t have tenure yet.”

“I had thought fine art was something more refined than that,” Yusuf said as he mulled Arthur’s comment over.

“Think of it this way, Yusuf,” Ariadne said, “If you’ve spent all month working on a project and your professor comes along and picks it apart in a critique and the only way to pass the class is to trash it and move on, don’t you want to vent your spleen with language before you actually do go postal and kill a bunch of faculty with a sharpened T-square?”

“I love that turn of phrase,” Christian murmured as he picked half-heartedly at his soup, “‘Going postal’. Such a prosaic way of saying it.”

“I certainly hope you have not actually sharpened one for that purpose,” Yusuf grinned a little nervously.

“Oh, of course not,” Ariadne said, her expression innocent, “That would ruin a perfectly good T-square and I could probably get further with a box cutter.”

“I have no idea how you met those two,” Christian said to her with a brief nod at Eames and Arthur, “but I like your attitude.”

* * *

“So,” Christian said after dinner was over. He cleared the dishes from the table and uncorked the bottle of wine that Arthur had brought, and a breath of apricots and figs hung in the air.

“What is this made of?” Ariadne asked as she sniffed experimentally at her wineglass. “It doesn’t smell like any kind of grape wine I’ve had.”

“Cloudberries,” Yusuf said with a small smile.“ _Rubus chamaemorus_ , native to the alpine and arctic tundra. They are delicious fresh.”

“I’ve never had cloudberries before.” Ariadne sipped at her wine. “You’re right. This is amazing.”

“Stay a few months if you like them,” Christian told them after he handed Eames a glass of the dessert wine. “They grow wild here and ripen in the fall.”

“I love Helsinki, but I don’t think we have the time for that,” Yusuf said with a faint smile as Oscar hopped onto the table and staked his claim on his lap.

“Maybe after we are finished with this business,” Christian murmured as he put the cork back on the bottle.

“No wine?” Eames asked him, “That’s not very you.” _Or very Finnish_ , he thought.

“Doctor’s orders,” Christian said offhandedly as he nursed his cup of coffee. “What did Nicole have to say, Arthur?” he asked, turning the conversation back to business.

“We have the green light,” Arthur said. “Heard back from Petra yet?” he asked, referring to the street chemist Christian had scouted out for the job in Russia before Yusuf got involved.

“She says she will do it but only because Yusuf is in on this,” Christian said with a faint, wicked smile, and Yusuf chose that moment to rub at his temples as though his head had started to hurt.

“Is she doing this because she likes you, or because she wants to show you up?” Eames asked, knowing full well that chemists didn’t always work well in groups.

“God only knows,” Yusuf said in a long-suffering moan. “Probably the latter. I should be so lucky.”

“Well, that’s all six of us,” Christian said. He drained his cup of coffee and then leaned back in his chair. “Care to start the briefing, Arthur?”

“Gladly.” Arthur pulled out his Moleskine notebook and flipped through it until he found the page he wanted. “As everyone present already knows, about fourteen months ago Cobb took a job with Cobol Engineering. They weren’t too happy when we failed to bring them what they wanted, and Cobb spent a while dodging hired guns while we worked on another job. Our new employer promised to smooth things over with Cobol after we were done, and he delivered, but our problem isn’t the company at this point.”

“Our problem is one lying bastard named John Woodruff,” Christian rasped, his shoulders tensed as he rubbed idly at his right forearm. The long-sleeved shirt he wore made it difficult to gauge the extent of his injury, but it was obvious that he was still in pain three years after the fact. “He used to be fairly high up in the corporate food chain and took care of a lot of their corporate espionage and sabotage up and down sub-Saharan Africa and into the Gulf,” he continued. “Before Cobol he worked with an oil and gas concern in post-Soviet Russia, which means mob contacts, and a lot of them.”

“Woodruff left Cobol about a year ago, after the dissolution of Fischer-Morrow was announced,” Arthur said. “I did a bit of digging around and found some internal communications that pretty much indicate that he was asked to resign. What happened in Singapore, LA and Paris was never corporate in the first place. This is just petty revenge, plain and simple.”

“That sounds like Vanya, all right,” Christian murmured, using Woodruff’s Russian nickname. “I did several jobs for him before Dubai. The money was good but he hates being wrong.”

“Uh, Christian, if you worked with him in Russia before all this,” Ariadne said slowly, over the rim of her wineglass, “Does this mean you have mob contacts too?”

Christian smiled coldly and glanced up at her through his hair. “Up until three years ago I was, um, an affiliate,” he said, halting as he tried to find the right word in English. “Not a brother proper, but someone who knew people and could make introductions.”

Ariadne shot a brief, nervous glance over at Arthur, who shrugged minutely, and then at Eames, who cleared his throat and steered the conversation back where it belonged.

“What complicates things,” he said, “is that we’re running into what would properly be intelligence territory. In Singapore we ran into something that should never have been out in the open. Woodruff had one of our former associates plant some intrusions countermeasures into a mark’s head.” That the mark was a dying seven-year-old was something he decided the others did not need to know. He still had a photograph of her tucked away under the false bottom of his overnight bag.

Arthur sighed at the memory, sipped at his wine and then looked back up from his notebook. He had never talked about what he had seen during the extraction in Singapore. “That’s a pretty common urban legend that circulates around the extraction scene. There’s always a thief who worked with a point man who knew someone who never came back from dreamshare after a mark turns out to have something in their head that shouldn’t be there. This, however, checks out on several levels.”

“It’s an artificial night terror; a nightmare so intense that it can kill an extractor trapped in it, usually with a stroke or a heart attack,” Eames continued. “I don’t know the specifics beyond the fact that it’s induced by deep hypnosis and triggered by an artificial allergy to somnacin.”

Yusuf frowned thoughtfully. “That would require a very specific and sophisticated drug cocktail, considering individual pharmacokinetics.”

“It does.” Eames sipped at his wine for punctuation and wished it were whisky instead. He wasn’t nearly drunk enough to be numbed to this. “Its drawbacks include a 50% mortality rate in the implantation process, and the subject generally has a high chance of dying of cardiac arrest or suffocation if the allergy’s ever triggered.”

“That would explain why you want two chemists in on this job, although I don’t know how much good it would do you,” Yusuf shrugged.

“You seem very familiar with this.” Ariadne said doubtfully.

 _Time for the confession,_ Eames thought. “There are three people still alive today who were part of the feasibility study. I happen to be one of them. I resigned shortly after.” A sour ache welled up behind his diaphragm as he looked into Ariadne’s face and saw the trust in her gaze behind the doubt.

A long silence followed, and Christian shifted restlessly in his chair before he spoke again. “What happened to the others?” he asked gently.

“One of them is still taking the Queen’s shilling. The other is unaccounted for,” Eames said in a long, heavy rush. Christian got up from his seat then and vanished into the kitchen. He returned with a small glass tumbler and a dusty bottle of Lagavulin, which he slid wordlessly across the table to Eames.

“It goes without saying that what we’re going into is extremely dangerous,” Arthur said with a significant glance at Ariadne, who bit her lip but remained silent. “That said if anyone wants to drop out now, I’d be fine with it.”

“You know I’m your man until Woodruff is dead,” Christian said with a grim smile as he refilled everyone’s wineglasses while Eames cracked the seal on the bottle of Scotch.

“Me too.” Yusuf shrugged. “No profit in this, but I don’t want to spend the rest of my presumably-short life looking constantly over my shoulder.”

“What about you?” Eames asked Ariadne after he had poured himself a finger of whisky. “You know we won’t blame you if you feel like you can’t do this after all.”

“I’m not going to say I’m not afraid.” Ariadne looked across the table at Eames, and then glanced over at Arthur. “But I’m still not going to let you two go off and get yourselves killed without at least doing something about it.”

“I appreciate that, Ariadne,” Arthur said, his gaze alert despite the dark circles around his eyes. He glanced down at his notebook, turned the page. “We probably won’t have any problem with getting most of our equipment there. Eames and I pulled in a few favors some months back and dropped a few bribes to have a small armory cached in Russia so we won’t have to worry about crossing the border illegally.”

“Hopefully we won’t need any of it, but I’d rather have it and not need it than the other way around. Besides, Arthur’s going to be lonely without Pandora,” Eames grinned, referring to the MP5K they had carried covertly around Paris a few weeks ago.

“Arthur mentioned that you had been doing a lot of legwork, in between your day job delivering flowers.” Ariadne said with a quiet glance at Christian. “What did you have planned?”

“Firstly, Arthur has it wrong in this case,” Christian said, faintly amused. “I work as a florist, not a delivery boy, and customers usually pick up individual orders because we think it’d be strange to have something so intimate delivered by a total stranger. I have driven the delivery truck once or twice for big orders, though.” He refilled his cup of coffee from the flask on the table, and then leaned back in his chair. “Like Arthur I’ve been caching equipment that I might have to use. I’ve scouted out good places for Yusuf and Petra to work out of and set up some boltholes that we can go to ground in if things go wrong. Which they will.”

“A professor I once studied under in university liked to say that a plan is a list of things that don’t happen,” Yusuf said with one of his playful smiles, and everyone nodded darkly at that, even Ariadne. “You will not believe the things he did. He condensed pure hydrogen cyanide into a flask for a project and got about two moles’ worth.”

“That’s –” Arthur did some rough mental calculation “That’s enough cyanide to kill a lot of people, if something had happened.”

“He was wearing full protective gear, naturally,” Yusuf said.

“Neat trick,” Christian smiled coldly, but Eames knew he wasn’t entirely serious from the crinkles around his eyes that showed up whenever he was feeling mischievous. “Anyway – there’s no way we can manage any kind of clean assassination or frontal assault. Woodruff’s in bed with the _bratva_ – if we charge in and kill him we’re probably not getting out alive, not with how valuable he is to them,” he continued. “That also doesn’t solve your problem,” he said, glancing at Arthur. “If Vanya has access to the IC or the people who can do it, then I’m fairly sure that his allies would also have access to it. Killing him outright would make it impossible for us to operate because we’d all have prices on our heads.”

“We’re not to expect any overt help from official channels,” Arthur said as he glanced down at his notebook. “The entire point of what we’re doing is that it can’t be traced back to them.”

“Exactly.” Christian smiled rather nastily then. “Fortunately I’ve made contacts with some individuals who, shall we say, aren’t entirely happy with the stranglehold his friends have on territory they’d like to expand into and they’re willing to meet me on neutral ground for a talk.”

“You’re going to sell the mobsters you used to work for to a rival faction,” Yusuf said mildly, raising an eyebrow at his audacity. “I hope you have a will prepared, because that is not going to endear you to anyone.”

“I stopped owing them anything the day they withdrew their protection and let Woodruff sell me out to a former mark in Dubai,” Christian hissed, “besides, you can’t kill a man who considers himself dead.”

Eames felt his heart lurch in his chest as though it had caught on a fishhook. “What do you mean by that?” he asked, ignoring Arthur’s warning glance in his direction.

“I have Hepatitis C,” Christian shrugged. “I’m going to need a liver transplant in five to eight years’ time.”

Eames gripped the stem of his empty wineglass so hard that it snapped in his hand, and he swore softly when he realized he’d cut himself. “Bloody hell, Chris – I’m sorry.” He nested the broken wineglass in his water glass and a fat drop of his blood rolled down the stem. The scope of Christian’s plans for revenge suddenly made sense, as well as why he was willing to execute them in a suicide mission, if need be.

“It’s okay. I can get replacements,” Christian said. “Iittala still makes those.”

“No, I mean –” Eames blurted before he sucked at his own fingertip, the tang of iron heavy in his mouth. “How long have you had it?” he asked awkwardly, realizing just how it sounded only after he had said it.

“A little more than three years,” Christian said, his voice sinking to a strangled whisper. “You don’t have to worry about your health, if that’s what you mean.” He bit his lip as though he wanted to say something else and then pushed his chair back and cleared the broken glass from the table.

“I’m fine,” Eames protested when Yusuf insisted on taking a look at his finger. “It’s stopped bleeding already, look.”

“Shouldn’t someone see if Christian is okay?” Ariadne asked, her question directed at no one in particular, and Arthur shrugged, a minute movement of his shoulders.

“If anyone has to talk to him I think it should be me,” Eames said, “me and my big mouth. I don’t know if it’d make it worse, though.” He smiled bitterly to himself, poured himself another shot of whisky and then got up and walked into the kitchen, tumbler in hand.

* * *

The kitchen was empty, but the back door was open and Eames could see Christian sitting on the steps outside, staring up into the darkening sky.

“Mind if I join you?” Eames asked as he stuck his head out the door.

“I’m sorry,” Christian said, his voice hoarse from suppressed emotion. “I shouldn’t be losing my temper like that.”

“I’m sorry too.” Eames sat down beside him and sipped from his tumbler of Scotch. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“It’s a valid worry, though,” Christian murmured. He had lost enough weight that his shoulder blades protruded sharply even through the fabric of his shirt. “We did take some stupid risks back then.”

“I trusted you then, and I trust you now.” Eames sighed, hesitated and glanced at Christian, but his hair hid most of his face from view. “I know you wouldn’t have done anything to endanger me like that.”

“More the fool for trusting a killer like me, I guess.” Christian laughed bitterly and then shook his head, brushed his hair out of his face.

Eames snorted, sipped again at his whisky. “You know the only true thing about what we do for a living – none of us will ever see heaven, so don’t give me any of that ‘killer’ shite, Chris.”

“Yes, but you see, I intend to deserve it.” He smiled then, a faint but genuine smile, and then winced in annoyance as the breeze stirred his hair and blew it over his face again.

“Don’t we all, though?” Eames asked as he shifted a little against the wind as it stung his eyes.

“Many aspire, but few actually achieve it.” The evening air was mild, but Christian shivered in the slight breeze – another change that hurt Eames to see. In the old days he had walked around completely indifferent to the cold.

“I think I’d stand a decent chance of succeeding.” Eames put his tumbler down on the step beside him and leaned closer to Christian, tried to put an arm around his shoulders and hold him close for warmth.

Christian flinched at the touch. “No,” he said as he pulled away and wrapped his arms around his knees.

“No?” Eames couldn’t say he hadn’t expected such a reaction but it still hurt, a mild, dull ache in the pit of his belly as he saw the fear flashing across Christian’s face before he had covered it with that familiar frozen smile.

“We can’t just pick up where we left off like nothing happened,” Christian said after a long moment spent staring at the first stars in the sky. “Too much has changed. We’re no longer the same people we were when we were in love.”

Eames mulled the words over and then looked back up into Christian’s eyes. “I’d like to say I’m a better man than I used to be.”

“Unfortunately I can only say I am now far worse than I used to be.” Christian said wryly, his smile a sad, bitter one.

Eames wanted to grab him by the collar then, pull him close and kiss the pain off his mouth, but he did not. Instead he sighed and leaned forward, rested his elbows on his thighs. “I’ll be the judge of that,” he said.

“Don’t. I’d hate to disappoint you yet again.” Christian stood stiffly, dusted his jeans off and stepped back inside, leaving Eames alone with the stars and his whisky.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Words in < > brackets denote conversation taking place in a language other than English that the POV character does in fact understand. Chlorpromazine is the generic name for Thorazine (Largactil to the rest of the world), an antipsychotic drug, and yes, the driver is in fact a shout-out to _Eastern Promises._

Eames thought it was funny how it was possible to know the break in a man’s voice and the taste of his skin and come away knowing only how he liked his coffee afterwards. Christian had always been like a mysterious artifact from a lost civilization, physical and tangible and real, but utterly mute about his past, and he had talked more about himself in the last few days than he had ever done so in the eighteen months they had lived together. Eames wondered how he had missed some of those details in hindsight, but he was now old and wise enough to know that there are none so blind as those who will not see, and he had spent most of those eighteen months in a willful sort of blindness.

* * *

Lunchtime meetings at Christian’s house became a regular part of their mission planning even though they were still short a team member. Petra had been too busy to meet up with everyone in Helsinki and had promised to link up with the team in Vyborg, once they had crossed the Russian border. Their itinerary was complete – the only thing they needed at this point was confirmation of their meeting in St. Petersburg, and that came late one afternoon two days before they were scheduled to leave.

Christian got a phone call just before four, and he had paced barefoot and restless across the kitchen floor while he spoke tersely to his caller in Russian. Eames was not familiar enough with the thieves’ cant used to know the details of the conversation, but it was obvious enough who was on the other end.

“My contacts just called to say that Nikolai’s agreed to meet us on neutral ground,” Christian said after he concluded the phone call. “Sidearms are permissible, but nothing more.”

“I don’t know how you talked him into it, but at least he’s letting us keep the guns,” Arthur said as he made a note in his Moleskine. He had set up a temporary HQ in Christian’s house and a corner of the kitchen table was now permanently reserved for a sheaf of folders and a slightly scuffed Toughbook.

Eames turned his poker chip over in his fingers, practiced the two-finger switch as he mulled the news over. “I’m still rather concerned about this being a trap.” He paused, glanced up at Christian. “How many of his people did you stab, again?”

“You know I do not keep count of that.” Christian stared down into his coffee mug; let his hair fall over his face. “It’s unprofessional,” he said.

Arthur gave Eames a warning look. _Keep your personal drama out of this, we’re here to work,_ it read. “Word from Nicole is that Nikolai’s in no position to argue,” he said, attempting to steer the conversation back on track. “Forgive me if I don’t get this entirely right,” he continued, “but I understand that seeking Nikolai’s backing is mostly a formality, seeing how Sergey’s people are edging him out of his turf.”

Christian drained his coffee cup, still avoiding Eames’ stare. “Yes and no,” he said. “We are probably going to start a mob war with our interventions, even if our intent is only to clean up after Woodruff. It is not something we can avoid – our actions are going to change the balance of power, and I would rather have it benefit someone than anyone.”

“The devil you know, eh?” Yusuf said from behind a copy of the _International Herald Tribune._

“Unfortunately I know them all, and I know he’s the least bad of all our alternatives.”

“Do they still call you the Ghost?” Eames glanced at Christian, who met his gaze this time. He could see the memories flitting behind those eyes, of the times they had held the extraction world by the ankles and shaken it until the money fell out. Those times were too good to last. _Nothing lasts forever._

“I wouldn’t know,” Christian said at last in his sandpaper voice. He looked away after that tense moment, his expression frozen over again.

Yusuf put his paper down and raised a brow at Christian. “I had thought ghosts were just urban legends,” he said.

There was a taut silence as Christian looked down at the polished wood of the tabletop, a quiet that thrummed in the air until Eames sighed and spoke up. “You would think so because they’re bloody rare, that’s what,” he said as he started to explain what it was that ghosts did.

* * *

Eames himself had thought it impossible until he had met Christian during a failed inception job. Ghosts were, according to the extractor who had hired them in the first place, rather like forgers whose talents were innate and not trained, but their roles in an extraction could not have been more different. Forgers were mercurial shapeshifters and conmen who could become anyone in dreams. Ghosts were the inverse; they were very specialized extractors whose identities had become so eroded that they were more a person-shaped void in a shared dream than an actual entity. This unstable self-image made them invisible to projections as long as they remained discreet.

* * *

“To use Cobb’s favorite analogy,” Arthur said as Eames finished his brief explanation, “if a mark’s projections are like white blood cells, then a ghost is a retrovirus that co-opts the mark’s own antigen coating so the immune system doesn’t catch on.”

“The required psychological profile does not sound healthy,” Yusuf had said, a little doubtfully. Eames could see that Ariadne shared Yusuf’s misgivings; it was obvious from Cobb and his murderous projection of Mal that it was difficult enough to keep track of reality in dreamshare without bringing the specter of psychological instability into it.

“It isn’t,” Christian said blandly, his mouth a little too thin and taut for the tone of his voice. “Most ghosts don’t last very long. They usually burn out spectacularly, kill themselves because they think they’re still dreaming or self-medicate into addiction and overdose.”

“What about therapy or medications?” Ariadne asked after a few moments of thought.

“Therapy would be why I refer to myself as an ex-ghost,” Christian said after a while. “The goal of therapy and medication is to treat the underlying personality disorder that allows an extractor to ghost in the first place. It’s a fine line to tread. I had to be insane enough to ghost, but not so insane that I couldn’t function. I wound up with a drug habit just to cope, and that led to a lot of stupid risk-taking behavior.”

“That explains everything now,” Eames said drily, and Christian punched him gently on the arm in response, his green eyes alight with a bittersweet amusement.

“So you don’t ghost any more?” Ariadne asked.

“I’m just an ordinary extractor now, and in the event that I start ghosting again it probably means I need my medication dosages adjusted.” Christian picked up one of his many pill bottles and shook it idly, listened to the pills rattling around inside. “That or a short stay in a nice padded room where I cannot hurt myself.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” Eames said, thinking now of the bad days as well as the good, of Christian’s insecurity and brittleness and of holding him all night until he calmed down.

“Well, if it does happen a little chlorpromazine never hurt anyone,” Yusuf said. Ariadne frowned at him, her expression vaguely frustrated as her mind drew a blank on the generic name.  
“Thorazine,” Arthur said helpfully in response to her puzzled look. Christian smiled, shook his head gently at Yusuf and then got up to refill the coffee cups.

“Can we really trust your contacts, Christian?” Ariadne asked him after he sat back down at the table. “I mean, I’m new to all this, but I’m fairly sure walking into a meeting with people who probably want you dead isn’t a good idea.”

“If Nikolai had wanted me dead I would have been found floating facedown in the Baltic Sea a long time ago,” Christian said. He cracked the knuckles of his left hand and then rubbed idly at his right forearm through the sleeve of his shirt, his mouth taut from pain. He had not bothered wearing the prosthetic today and had pinned his sleeve up instead.

“Are you all right?” Yusuf asked.

Christian nodded absently in reply. “I am just trying to fool my brain into thinking my hand is still there. The pain is not too bad, but it feels always like my hand has fallen asleep."

“So why has he not tried?” Eames asked, probing gently for any kind of response, “I’d expect a man like Nikolai to want revenge for his dead son.”

Christian’s head snapped up as he looked back up at Eames, his expression hard and defiant; a look that Eames understood instantly. He was willing to explain some aspects of his past now, but other, darker things still lay submerged in the space behind his eyes. “I was working on Sergey’s orders. Later he discarded me and let Woodruff set me up in Dubai. Nikolai is not the kind of man who will leave a gun because an enemy has used it to shoot at him. Not especially if it’s the only weapon he may have to hand.”

“Why is that?” Ariadne asked. She appeared genuinely interested despite her uncertainty on the topic.

“Politics and economics, mostly,” Christian shrugged. “A lot of the _vory v zakone_ – the thieves-in-law, they are losing ground to the New Russians with university degrees, oil and gas money, political clout. Nowadays you’re more likely to see corrupt police running the protection rackets, not the brothers. Big business money got involved when dreamshare went underground, and the newcomers have been taking over the organizations from within.”

“There are similar schisms in organized crime everywhere,” Arthur said. He sipped at his coffee and then put the cup down. “Younger, more educated types get into fields the old guard don’t even consider as a possibility, and then they have more money and power than the traditionalists, but far fewer rules.”

Eames tilted his head, smiled cynically. “No honor among thieves, eh?” In his personal experience, big business money almost always signified a willingness to use and discard assets in a manner that spoke of human beings reduced to base economic units in a mental ledger.

“It depends on the thief in question. My father and I, we both worked for Sergey’s father before he took over. Mikhail would never have betrayed one of his own unless they sold him out first. Sergey, not so much. He has a business degree from Harvard. I suppose he learned to cheat and steal from the best.” The cadence of Christian’s speech slowed as he translated mentally into English before he spoke.

“The US mortgage industry can testify to that,” Arthur said. There was a soft creak as he tipped his chair back and rocked on the spot like a bored schoolboy.

“Or, you know, Iceland’s entire economy,” Yusuf said with a wicked smile.

“The darker side of business school and economics,” Ariadne said, and Eames remembered the university transcripts he had acquired when he did the background check, and the microeconomics survey class she had taken as an undergraduate. “One can use economies of scale and market research for good or for very bad. Things are just what they are.”

“Amen,” Arthur let the chair drop back on all four of its legs with a soft screech, shifted uneasily in a way that made Eames wonder if the old injury to his hip was hurting him again.

“So yes, I would trust Nikolai, at least for that first meeting in St. Petersberg,” Christian said, returning to the original topic of their discussion. “What happens after, we shall see. I expect that if things don’t go well he’ll probably give us enough time to get out of the city before he sends hit men after us.” Eames knew Finnish humor well enough to know that he was joking, but his expression was dead enough that the others would have no idea whether he was serious or simply indulging a pessimistic streak.

* * *

They left Helsinki for Vyborg two days later, and Christian was still making phone calls and answering text messages while their train pulled out of Rautatieasema – the central station. Ariadne had asked him if there was something wrong after the fifth phone call, and he shook his head and smiled crookedly at her.

“Nothing to worry about,” he said. “It is my next-door neighbor asking me things like how much she needs to feed Oscar every day.”

“I didn’t think your next-door neighbor spoke Russian,” Ariadne said mildly.   
Christian looked at her, grinned his approval. “Sharp,” he said, and the look he shot to Eames suggested that the fib had been more of a test than an actual lie. “I was just talking to a few contacts, setting up a safeguard in case things go wrong at the meeting.”

“Isn’t that just a little paranoid?” Ariadne asked.

“It’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you,” Arthur said without lifting his gaze from his copy of _Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrel._

“And you wonder why I prefer not to go into the field,” Yusuf said.

* * *

Petra met them at Vyborg as promised, and she had not changed much from the last time Eames had seen her over four years ago. Her hair was now red and she had a few more piercings, but she still wore bruise-colored lipstick and metal-band t-shirts, and he smiled to notice the unlit Ziganov Black tucked behind her ear like a pencil.

She waved to them at the station platform and then gave Eames a brief hug and a polite kiss on the cheek. “Good to see you, you cheating bastard,” she had said by way of greeting. She greeted Christian with another hug and a kiss, which he took with a long-suffering grace born of long acquaintance. She let go of Christian’s neck after a minute and glanced over at Arthur, who had just retrieved an unremarkable-looking duffel bag from a locker in the train station. “Is that Eames’ new boyfriend?” she asked in a loud stage whisper.

“That’s Arthur,” Christian said with his usual lack of affect, but wicked amusement gleamed in his eyes as he turned also to look in Arthur’s direction.

“ _The_ Arthur?” Petra whispered, as she looked him over. “He’s a lot cuter than I expected. What is he, seventeen?”

“I can hear you, you know,” Arthur said over his shoulder as Petra shook hands with Ariadne, and he rolled his eyes in mock exasperation over Ariadne’s giggles.

“I have no idea how you got involved with these guys, but it’s nice to have another woman on the job. You have no idea how boring it is without someone to talk girly stuff with.” Petra said warmly. It amused Eames to see them standing next to each other – Petra was nearly as tall as Arthur, which only served to highlight Ariadne’s delicate build.

“Your English is almost American-sounding,” Ariadne said after she had let go of Petra’s hand. “Where did you learn it?”

“South Park and trashy romance novels,” Petra said with a wicked grin, “Oh, and my undergraduate degree at Cal Tech.”

“I’m surrounded by smart people,” Ariadne groaned.

Arthur poked Ariadne gently on the shoulder with his free hand. “Says Professor Miles’ brightest protégé.”

Ariadne blushed self-consciously, frowned in Arthur’s direction. “Yeah, but I’m one of his architecture students and that’s not exactly a hard science.”

“If you’re good enough for his standards you’re probably smarter than most of us here,” Petra said kindly before she walked over to Yusuf, who had kept himself on the periphery of the group the whole time.

“You,” she said, slapping him on the shoulder, “What are you doing hiding from me?”

“I wasn’t hiding. I knew you’d get to me eventually,” said Yusuf, and Eames could not help but laugh at his old friend’s utter discomfort. He knew that professional rivalry had something to do with it, but it also sounded as though Petra enjoyed teasing Yusuf more than he enjoyed being teased.

“Um, Eames, what’s going on?” Ariadne whispered over to the others as she watched Yusuf squirm.

“They, um, have a past,” Christian said softly before Eames could answer. “I never got a straight answer out of either of them, so you’ll have to ask them yourself.”

“Like you and Eames?” she asked with a knowing look in his direction.

Eames shrugged, smiled to cover the ache of nostalgia somewhere behind his heart. “If they have a past Yusuf has never told me about it,” he said after a brief pause. “Perhaps they’re just friendly rivals.”

“I don’t know,” Ariadne murmured. “I think they like each other, they just show it differently. Like you and Arthur,” she said in a stage whisper for Arthur’s benefit.

“I never claimed to like Eames,” Arthur said as he adjusted the strap of the duffel bag on his shoulder, “I just work with him.” The smile on his face betrayed his real thoughts on the situation; they had come to something of an understanding in the fallout following the job in Singapore, and Eames was fairly confident that it still held even if Arthur chose to protest the fact in public.

“Keep telling yourself that, huh?” Ariadne asked, her expression knowing and wicked, and Christian shook his head gently as he watched Arthur’s ears turn red.

* * *

“Ariadne’s a nice girl,” Christian murmured softly to Eames as they boarded the express train to St. Petersburg an hour later. She had entered the compartment ahead of them and was no longer in earshot.

Eames adjusted the strap of his overnight bag on his shoulder as the train lurched into motion, shot a glance over at Christian once he was sure of his footing. “You’re not going to get rid of me by pairing us up, you know.”

“She’s too nice to deserve anything like that,” Christian said, straight-faced for a beat. Eames snorted, smiled ruefully at him as he shook his head and smiled a little, his eyes wistful behind the ice. A messy hank of hair fell over his face but he made no attempt to brush it away. “No. I’d like to keep her if I could.”

Eames raised an eyebrow in askance. “Like a pet?” he asked.

“Like a sister.” Christian mouthed the words as he turned to leave, but Eames read the words on his lips and caught him by the sleeve of his jacket, pulled him down to his level. The train rocked gently around them as he stopped and waited for Eames to speak again.

“Did you have a sister?” Eames asked him, as gently as he could, “You’ve never talked about your family, not even while we were together.”

Christian tugged his sleeve out of Eames’ grasp and straightened up out of his reach. His expression was unreadable, his eyes hidden behind strands of hair that gleamed gold in the afternoon sunlight. “There is no-one left to talk about,” he said before he left to join the others.

* * *

Their arrival in St. Petersburg had not gone unnoticed. Nikolai had sent a driver – his name was Vladimir – down to the train station to collect them in a Mercedes R350. He had greeted Christian with grave courtesy and helped Petra and Ariadne with their luggage, but a glance at the man told Eames that he was probably more than just a driver. Elaborate prison tattoos crawled across his knuckles and above the collar of his shirt, and while Eames didn’t understand the iconography the Russians used he knew enough to guess that Vladimir probably ranked higher than the average mob soldier. He would have put even money on the man being armed even now.

 _Well, two can play at that game_ ; Eames thought. He smiled faintly as the sight of Arthur’s seeming obliviousness as he read his novel with the duffel bag in his lap. They had left their handguns with Yves back in Paris before they had boarded the commercial flight to Helsinki, and the arms dealer had, for a fee, arranged for the equipment to be cached discreetly across the Russian border. The duffel bag didn’t contain all of the guns they had actually cached, but it did hold their sidearms and backup guns, including Ariadne’s Skyph. In the event that this chauffeur was also an assassin he would have Arthur’s Glock 17 to contend with at the very least.

Eames climbed into the Mercedes with Ariadne beside him, and he felt her reach for his hand after they had seated themselves. Her fingers were cold and clammy with anxiety but she had adopted the marble calm of a statue and feigned it well. She smiled briefly up at him when he squeezed her hand reassuringly and then turned to look out at the city streets through the smoked glass windows. Eames could see no tension in the set of Vladimir’s shoulders but his eyes were hard and bright in the rear-view mirror, and he kept as much of an eye on them as he did on the road.

* * *

Vladimir dropped them off at the Astoria on St. Isaac’s Square, and Ariadne let herself sag wearily once the black SUV was no longer in line of sight.

“Are you all right?” Christian asked. He reached out to steady her with his left hand. There was something distant about the way he stood, as though he were holding her at arms’ reach in case she tried to hug him.

“Yeah. It was just a little nerve-wracking,” she said, her voice faintly shaky as she rubbed at her face with a hand.

Christian nodded in sympathy. “Russian drivers are maniacs,” he said. He let go of Ariadne as Arthur stepped up to tuck an arm around her shoulders. She looked oddly fragile right now, as though the anxiety had sapped her physically, left her less substantial than she had been before.

“Russian drivers don’t scare her. She knows Paris drivers,” Eames said as Ariadne leaned briefly against Arthur’s shoulder and then straightened up, herself again. They had gotten close since Paris, Eames thought, and for a brief moment he felt a faint twinge in his chest, something that wasn’t quite jealousy but was uncomfortably close, nevertheless.

“You didn’t have to worry,” Christian told them. “I was keeping an eye on him from the front passenger seat. If he had tried to start something he would not have lived to finish it.” That was not a boast. Eames knew Christian’s speed and skill with the knife, and he was probably almost as good with his left hand as he had been with his right.

“That’s reassuring, I guess,” Ariadne said doubtfully.

“I will not let anybody hurt you,” he told her. “That’s a promise, and Michael can tell you that I keep my promises.” That was the truth – Christian was more likely to avoid making promises than to break them, and Eames could not help but think of the wistfulness in his face earlier, when he had wished for a sister like Ariadne.

“What do you think is going to happen tomorrow?” Ariadne asked him, a little nervously.

“That depends on the mood Nikolai is in when we see him,” Christian said with a shrug and a half-hearted, lopsided smile.

* * *

The journey from Helsinki and the tense drive to the hotel had left Eames stiff and sore, and he retreated to his room once the formalities of check-in were done with. A hot shower helped him work most of the stiffness out of his back and shoulders but also left him feeling drained of energy, and he was pondering a nap when he heard a polite knock on the door. He sighed quietly to himself, pulled on some clothes and then looked through the peephole. Arthur stood in the hallway outside with the duffel bag hanging off his shoulder, and Eames stepped away from the door and let him in.

“I have something to give you,” Arthur said once the door had been shut and locked behind him. He crossed to the bed, put the duffel bag down and unzipped it to reveal the handguns Yves had helped them smuggle into Vyborg.

“I trust that Yves fulfilled his end of the bargain,” Eames said as he sat down on the side of the bed beside Arthur.

“Pretty much.” Arthur pulled out Eames’ holstered SIG P220 and USP Compact from the duffel bag, laid them on the bed over the covers. The spare magazines in their carriers followed.

“Thank you,” Eames said after he had looked both the guns over. Both of the guns had been shipped unloaded for safety reasons, but they were otherwise in good condition.

“No problem.” Arthur zipped the duffel bag back up but hesitated as though unwilling to leave.

“There’s a problem, isn’t it?” Eames asked after he had put both guns down on the nightstand.

Arthur sat down on the bed beside him and pulled the duffel bag onto his lap. “You’ve been kind of distracted lately, and it isn’t just jet lag,” he said after a few moments of silence.

“Is that so?” Eames asked. He had not thought it that obvious, but Arthur was one of the most perceptive people he knew. Nothing got past him – it was why he was the best point man in the business.

“You haven’t flirted at me since Helsinki,” Arthur said with a quick smile and a shake of his head. “Something’s off, I’m just not sure what it is.”

“Are you sure it’s isn’t just hormones? Ariadne seems rather fonder of you than usual.”

Arthur made a slight face of annoyance. “Don’t try to change the subject, Eames. You know there’s nothing going on between us, and even if there was I know that wouldn’t have stopped you from flirting anyway.”

Eames smiled as he swung his legs up onto the bed and stretched himself out. The firm denial confirmed his suspicions more than any display of affection could. “I think she likes you and I know for a fact that she’s your type.”

Arthur stood up and slung the duffel bag back onto his shoulder, his expression pensive. “Ariadne being my type still doesn’t make it a good idea,” he said softly, “it’s not good procedure for any kind of job.”

“This isn’t a normal job, Arthur,” Eames said. “We’re on our own, answer to no one and we are letting my insane ex set the timetable and handle negotiations with the mob. I doubt we have any semblance of procedure left.” He smiled ruefully despite himself, felt a slight relief as Arthur grinned in reply.

“Maybe,” Arthur said as he reached out to open the door.

“If it helps you should know that I’m right here in the event that she turns you down,” Eames said.

“I should probably be relieved that you’re saying inappropriate things to me again,” Arthur said, “but that’s pretty cold comfort, as it comes.” He looked back at Eames, all seriousness again as he turned the doorknob. “I’m worried that your past with Christian is going to complicate things.”

“I don’t think it’s so much the past as much as how much he’s changed in the present,” Eames said. “I’ll be all right. I just need some time to get used to how things are now.” He shifted in bed, pondered raiding the mini-bar in his room. There had to be decent Scotch in there somewhere.

Arthur nodded, opened the door. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry,” he said before the door clicked shut behind him. _So am I_ , Eames thought as he stared up at the ceiling of his room, a vague ache rattling the fragile equilibrium somewhere between his chest and gut.

* * *

Christian had arranged for the team to meet Nikolai’s people at a private tearoom the next day. The formal setting of the meeting demanded appropriate dress, and he had risen to the occasion by putting on a funereal-looking black suit with a matching tie.

“Isn’t that a little _Reservoir Dogs?”_ Eames asked him as they waited in the lobby for the elevator.

“Only if I get to be Mr. Blond,” Christian said. A humorless smile played over his face in the uncomfortable beat of silence that followed. It was all too easy to imagine Christian taking someone’s ear off with a straight razor, especially when he looked like this.

 _You don’t even like that song,_ Eames wanted to say when a soft ding signaled the elevator arriving at their floor. “Who would I be then?” he asked as the doors slid shut.

“Mm.” Christian glanced thoughtfully at him and then shrugged easily. “Mr. White,” he said.

“Not Mr. Pink?” Eames asked.

“Arthur would be a better Mr. Pink,” Christian said as the elevator doors slid open.

Arthur had been the first to finish getting ready and he had been waiting in the lobby for the others to come downstairs one by one. He was exquisitely dressed as usual, this time in a three-piece suit the color of morning fog. “I’d love to know why I heard my name mentioned there,” he said as they stepped out of the elevator, his gaze vaguely curious.

“We were just discussing Quentin Tarantino. Chris thinks you would make a good Mr. Pink,” Eames explained.

“Why do I have to be Mr. Pink?” Arthur asked. The look on his face suggested that he knew the answer already.

“Because you are the most professional one in this group,” Christian said. He reached into his jacket for a pair of sunglasses and Eames caught a glimpse of red, obscene and vivid against the white of his shirt.

“Did you spill something?” Eames asked.

“No. It’s supposed to be there,” Christian undid his suit jacket, tugged the lapel aside to give them a better look, and Eames noticed that he was not carrying a sidearm.

Arthur craned his neck for a better look at the red blot. “You have a sequined bloodstain on your shirt,” he said, his voice flat with disbelief.

Christian shrugged, rubbed at his forearm though the sleeve of his shirt and jacket. “Think of it as a message that I want sent.”

“What, that you like sparkly things?” Eames asked half-seriously. Another one of those frozen smiles flickered across Christian’s face as he buttoned his suit jacket back up, but he did not answer.

* * *

Vladimir picked the team up at the Astoria and drove them to the meeting with Nikolai. They were ushered into the tearoom with cordial hospitality and seated at a table around an enormous brass samovar. Waiting for them was an old man in a slightly shabby blue suit, the fabric worn shiny from time and wear. A puckered scar wound its way around his neck, and blurry tattoos marked the knuckles of both his hands. He looked to the world like a broken old man, but Eames knew at a glance that he was much more than that. Only the toughest lived to wear their scars, and he wore his authority with a casual ease. A pair of bodyguards sat to his left and right, and two more minders stood by the door of the tearoom once everyone had been seated.

< “Soloviev,”> the old man said in a raspy croak, < “I trust you are well.”>

< “About as well as can be expected, Nikolai Nikitich,”> Christian said with a respectful nod.

< “So what brings a marked man to _Piter,_ and with such company?” > Nikolai waved casually at one of his bodyguards, who got up then to stand silently by Christian’s chair.

< “The same thing that you are looking for. The settling of a debt.”> If he was intimidated by the gesture he did not show it. Instead he poured himself a measure of _zavarka_ – a concentrated tea infusion – and diluted it with hot water from the samovar.

“You mean the debt that you are owing me for my son’s life?” Nikolai asked, his voice sinking to a strangled whisper as he switched to English. Shit, Eames thought as he caught the glint of steel in the bodyguard’s hand, saw him hold the knife to Christian’s neck. He found himself reaching under the table into his trouser pocket, his fingertips brushing against the checkered grip of his USP Compact in its pocket holster.

“I am here to settle the debt Sergey owes you for Dmitri’s life.” Christian dipped a spoonful of honey into his tea and stirred, his movements exaggeratedly casual. A cold sweat ran down Eames’ back under his shirt as he watched the edge of the knife dimple the skin above Christian’s shirt collar. There was no way he could draw and fire safely, not while they were surrounded like this. Yusuf and Arthur were stony-faced, Ariadne pale as a sheet. Petra blinked and drew a Ziganov Black out of the pack she kept in her purse, tapped it out and held it to her bruise-colored lips.

“How do you propose you do that? Or are you as much of a liar as your old master is?” Nikolai demanded. There was a soft ping in the background as one of the mobsters lit Petra’s cigarette for her, the gallant gesture incongruous against the tattoos and broken nose, the knives and the tension.

“Take your hand off your gun, Michael,” Christian said without even looking at Eames, “This is a matter for me to settle, not yours.” He put the teaspoon down on the saucer and then picked up his teacup, and the bodyguard lifted the knife slightly so he could sip his tea. Tiny droplets of blood welled up in the scratch where the knife had been, rolled down to stain the collar of his shirt. He took a long sip of his tea and then put the teacup down.

“Firstly,” Christian said, “Sergey conspired with Ivan Woodruff to sell me out. They both owe me a hand.” He reached into his jacket with the hook prosthetic, his movements slow and careful. The bodyguard pressed the knife-edge against his throat again, but all that came was a soft rustle as he drew a folded manila envelope out of an inside pocket and laid it carefully on the tablecloth. “My friends have a score to settle with Vanya, and they are willing to go through Sergey to get him. The resulting power vacuum can only work to your advantage.”

“I could just have you killed now and deal directly with them instead,” Nikolai hissed, and Christian smiled coldly, shook his head.

“We don’t work like that,” Arthur said, spreading both his hands on the tablecloth. “He goes unharmed, or the deal is off.” Ariadne reached under the table for Eames’ right hand and he squeezed her fingers in his own, as much for his own reassurance as hers.

“Besides, I’m dying,” Christian said as he picked up the envelope with his left hand, held it out to Nikolai’s other bodyguard. “These medical reports say that it could be a matter of years or months, but my liver is failing. You know as well as I do it’s going to be a long, painful death, and while you’re fairly creative I don’t think anything you can do to me is going to compare to what I’m going to get anyway.”

Nikolai picked up the envelope, read its contents with the long-sighted squint of the elderly. There was a phlegmy wheeze that Eames realized was laughter as he put the papers down. “Clever. If I kill you, I’m giving you an easy way out.”

“Exactly.” Christian smiled, picked up his teacup and took another sip before he spoke in Russian again. < “Besides, if you’re going to slit my throat now you should probably have your man wrap a tea towel around my neck to save the upholstery.”>

< “Like your father used to do?”> Nikolai asked, waving his bodyguard away. Eames let out a breath he did not realize he was holding, and let go of Ariadne’s hand.

< “I learned from the best,”> Christian said a little sadly as the thug took his knife off his neck and sat back down.

* * *

The trip back to the Astoria passed in stony silence, and nobody spoke until Ariadne cornered Christian in the upstairs elevator lobby on the way back to their hotel rooms. She slapped him hard, once, and then burst into tears.

“What the fuck was that bluff all about?” she asked, her tiny frame trembling with suppressed fury. “Our lives aren’t yours to gamble.”

Christian put his hand to his mouth and looked down at the blood on his fingers – she had hit him hard enough that he had cut his lip on his teeth. “Your lives were never in danger,” he said after a brief, stunned silence. “Nikolai’s grudge was with me alone.”

“Well, how do you think I felt watching them get ready to kill you?” Ariadne hissed, her voice barely audible through her angry tears. “Your life isn’t yours to throw away either.” Arthur came up behind her and tucked an arm around her shoulder, nodded curtly at Christian, who echoed the gesture as though half-asleep.

“I’m sorry,” he said hollowly as Ariadne sagged against Arthur’s shoulder, the doubt and confusion naked in his gaze.

“We’ll talk about this later,” Arthur said as he bundled Ariadne into his arms and then walked her back to her room.

“Ariadne was worried about you, you know,” Petra whispered after they had gone. She dabbed gently at Christian’s cut lip with a clean handkerchief that she had borrowed from Yusuf, pressed it into his hand and closed his fingers around it before she, too, left the lobby.

Christian held the square of linen tightly in his fist. “I don’t understand,” he said half to himself, his voice beginning to shake as his self-control started to unravel from the stress. He shut his eyes wearily, shook his head, and then turned as though to leave. Eames caught him by the wrist before he could, his fingers closing around the carbon-fiber socket of the prosthetic under his sleeve. Christian froze at the touch, his eyes wild and alert, but he did not pull away.

“I would really appreciate it, Christian, if you told us the next time you were going to do anything that suicidal,” Eames said wearily, his own anger dying for lack of fuel before it could even flare, taste of salt in his mouth, stinging in his eyes and nostrils. Christian stared at him mutely, too tired to fight or argue. They stood uneasily in the hallway for a few moments before Christian wrenched his wrist free of Eames’ grip and stalked silently back to his room.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to [skiriki](http://skiriki.livejournal.com/) for the Finn-picking and to [heronymus_waat](http://heronymus-waat.livejournal.com/) for the beta. I haven’t translated the Finnish for this because the meaning’s pretty obvious even without.

An improvised sniper roost in an empty office was probably one of the stranger places to hold any kind of heart-to-heart talk, but Eames had had similarly personal chats in odder places, among them the changing room in an exclusive lingerie store and the pantry in a Michelin three-star restaurant. Intelligence work tended to take a man odd places and this was hardly the weirdest.

“Do you think she’s going to stay?” Arthur asked as he glanced through the scope of his new sniper rifle, covering the square beneath them in a slow, careful sweep. Eames didn’t expect their target to come their way this early, but Arthur was still slightly unused to the sights and action on that particular rifle and the grouping on his practice shots had not been as tight as he had liked.

“Ariadne? I think she has what it takes to finish the job, but – ” Eames paused, scrawled the wind direction on a scrap of notepaper and then checked the distance to the street with a laser rangefinder again. “I don’t think she expected us to be committing bloody murder, as it were.”

“Maybe I should have been more clear with her from the start,” Arthur sighed. He put the rifle back down and took a quick sip from a bottle of water, offered it to Eames, who shook his head and pulled his smartphone from his jacket pocket.

“I don’t see how we could have been any clearer when she told us she was going to come along, back in Paris,” Eames said after he pulled an app up on the touchscreen. “Maybe she wasn’t as familiar with her Milton as I had hoped.”

“400 meters is the most I can manage with this rifle,” Arthur whispered as he looked out at the street with Eames’ field glasses. “Hope he doesn’t take too much of a detour picking his kid up from piano lessons.”

“The usual route on his itinerary is well within your range. Trust my working,” Eames grinned slyly at Arthur – a wasted gesture with Arthur still staring down at street level through the field glasses.

“You did say math wasn’t your strong suit,” Arthur said as he checked his watch, glanced at the scribbled calculations on the messy notes Eames had taken.

Eames only held out his smartphone and waved it in Arthur’s direction. “There’s an app for it.”

“Figures,” Arthur muttered as he picked up the phone and checked the calculations against Eames’ own, nodding quietly as the numbers added up. “I do wonder what you have to gain from acting like some kind of idiot.”

“Nothing but your condescension, which is something of an acquired taste,” Eames chuckled half to himself as he pulled a Dunhill from the pack in his shirt pocket, lit it and offered it to Arthur.

“I don’t know if I should be relieved or offended that you’ve started flirting at me again,” Arthur said as he accepted the lighted cigarette from Eames.

 _Take it as a compliment,_ Eames thought but did not say as he watched Arthur inhale deeply. He always refused to carry cigarettes or a lighter, a quirk that Eames found vaguely charming – as though that obstinacy made all those cadged cigarettes not count. “What was that about quitting, by the way?” he asked too-gently, “About, oh, two years ago?”

“Quitting is easy. I’ve done it lots of times.” Arthur said. Fragrant smoke curled out of Arthur’s nostrils to mingle with the pepper and frankincense of his cologne. Bluish wisps unfurled about his head to give his sharp features a draconic cast, and Eames could not help but think of how the smoke would taste in Arthur’s mouth if he stole a kiss right now. Instead he lit a cigarette for himself and took a long drag, held it in his lungs until his head filled with light.

 _This is not the time and place,_ he reminded himself as he exhaled. _We have a job to do._ He squinted out of the window and glanced down into the busy street. Christian was somewhere in the lunchtime crowd, spotting from street level so that Arthur could move quickly if their mark decided to take another route today.

 _We have a man to kill today,_ Eames thought as he tapped the ash off his cigarette onto the windowsill. _Ariadne probably has the right of it – we are murderous bastards._

* * *

Eames didn’t think of himself as any kind of saint, but he liked to think that assassination was generally beneath his usual _modus operandi._ Very few extractions began or ended in any kind of murder – things had often gone irreversibly wrong by the time the guns came out. Any shooting usually happened in self-defense when jobs went wrong or when clients tried to screw them over. This wasn’t a normal extraction, however – for one, dreams were only one part of the train wreck they were heading into. This was the sort of thing he generally considered suicidal – it never paid to get involved in any kind of vendetta, let alone one driven by a former extractor of questionable sanity. The problem with avoidance in this case was that if the intrusions countermeasures made it out of Woodruff’s hands there wouldn’t be an extraction scene left to work in after all was said and done.

This situation left them without the luxury of retreat or a moral high ground when Nikolai had laid out the conditions for their little Russian excursion. The team would be permitted to operate under his protection provided they helped him rub out a rival – an act that would force the team to pick a side. It made perfect sense. They were, for all intents and purposes, a dangerous wild card in a situation that was going to unravel fast once the guns came out. Forcing the team to announce their affiliation in a high-profile assassination meant that they would be unable to turn around and sell him to another faction – a matter of some import considering Christian’s calculated betrayal of Sergey and Woodruff.

That uneasy give-and-take was utterly familiar to Eames, and he knew that most of the others had been in the scene long enough to know how such things worked – which left Ariadne. It was clear that the prospect of outright murder bothered her conscience – she made a game attempt at hiding her discomfort, but in some ways she was as transparent as window glass, and so very young. At least Nikolai had not been stingy on the equipment. Eames had no idea where his people had acquired a VSS Vintorez, but neither he nor Arthur had complained when Vladimir had delivered it to them in its special briefcase.

* * *

They waited for another tense half-hour before Eames’ phone buzzed ominously. He checked the caller ID, picked up the call and put it on speakerphone as Arthur picked up the rifle and took careful aim.

“I see his armored car,” Christian whispered from the other end. Eames glanced through his binoculars, spotted Christian across the street from their mark, inconspicuous. “They’re turning the corner right now.”

“I see him,” Eames said. “Do you have him, Arthur?”

“Yeah, I see him,” Arthur murmured. He swiveled the rifle lightly out the open window, making minute adjustments as he settled the crosshairs over the armored car. “One of his bodyguards is getting out first.”

“I see that. Get ready to run interference if we need it, Chris,” Eames said. He checked the range on the shot – a little inside 380 meters, which Arthur could manage with the Vintorez.

 _“Ehkä,”_ Christian murmured through his Bluetooth earpiece. _Maybe._ Eames smiled grimly as he watched Christian stop a decent distance away from their mark and glance around at a crosswalk like any other jaywalker. A near-accident would distract everyone if Arthur needed an extra second to line up the shot.

“He’s getting out now. Come on…” Arthur whispered as he adjusted his aim. Eames watched the mark climb out of his car, flanked by black-suited bodyguards. The late afternoon sunlight gleamed off the rims of his glasses and off his thinning hair, and he looked more like an accountant than the mobster he actually was. The only giveaways were the tattoos showing above the collar of his shirt.

 _“Pulunnussija_ needs to hurry up,” Christian hissed. He stood at the crosswalk, smartphone in his gloved right hand as though checking the time.

“Language,” Arthur said mildly as he raised the muzzle of the Vintorez minutely to compensate for drop. “Get ready, Eames.”

 _You don’t even know what that word means,_ Eames wanted to say, but did not. Instead he reached into his trouser pocket and let his thumb brush lightly over the trigger button on the detonator, cleared his throat before speaking again. “I’m ready when you are,” he said, turning away from the window as he waited for Arthur’s cue.

“Just a little bit more… two more steps,” Arthur said, his voice dropping to a whisper as he slipped his finger in the trigger guard. His shoulders tensed as he held his breath and then there was the distinctive _pssht_ of the Vintorez as its integral suppressor muffled the report of its subsonic round.

Eames hit the button on the detonator as Arthur fired and was rewarded with a faint-but-distinctive crack a half-second later. Arthur had decided to take advantage of the rifle’s quietness by planting a harmless explosive charge nearly a kilometer away from their position – the sound it made when detonated would convince their target’s bodyguards that the sniper was 800 meters away from where they really were and buy them time to leave the scene discreetly.

“Nice shot,” Christian murmured through his earpiece as he confirmed the kill visually. “See you back at the safehouse.” There was a soft staticky sound as he ended the phone call.

Eames glanced down at the scene through his field glasses as Arthur started to disassemble the rifle and put it back in its carrying case. A messy streak of red had smeared across the plate-glass doors as the man had fallen forward, and hell had started to break loose as pedestrians froze in place and the bodyguards broke forward in a futile attempt to protect their now-dead employer. Christian was nowhere to be seen but Eames didn’t need to see him to know where he was – he could imagine him darting down an alleyway, footsteps light and quick.

“I’m heading out,” Arthur said from his right, and Eames nodded absently as he folded the field glasses and tucked them away in a jacket pocket. He pinched his cigarette out between thumb and forefinger and dropped the butt out of the window before he left the empty office with Arthur’s MP5K in his grip.

* * *

The trip back to their temporary hideout was uneventful for the most part, but Eames knew something was amiss when he arrived and found Ariadne pacing amidst the dusty mannequins from when this space had once been a clothing shop.

“What are you doing here, love?” he asked her. “Weren’t you supposed to have gone ahead with Yusuf and Petra?” Christian had arranged for the chemists to set up shop in a former dispensary, and she was supposed to have gone on with them earlier that afternoon.

“I told them I’d wait for you,” she said. She had left her jacket hanging on an empty clothing rack and Eames noticed that she was carrying her Skyph in a holster behind her right hip. “Where’s Christian?” she asked. “Arthur says he should have been here by now.”

“I don’t know. We all took separate routes,” Eames said. He pulled out his smartphone and checked his messages, but there were none.

“I thought he’d have waited to come back with you,” said Arthur as he emerged from the stockroom to stand in the doorway linking it to the front of the shop.

Motes of dust danced in the thin shafts of sunlight leaking through the newspapers taped over the empty windows and Eames had to fight the urge to sneeze. Instead he tucked his phone away and shrugged. “He might have had to double back to lose a tail.”

“I guess I shouldn’t worry about him,” Ariadne said doubtfully, “But I do. Things went okay?” She wiped at her own nose with a tissue and glanced up at him as though afraid, and Eames was fairly sure the red around her eyes was not from any kind of dust or allergy.

“As well as anything like this can,” Arthur said before he vanished back into the stockroom, where he waited for Vladimir to call.

Ariadne nodded silently in reply and then turned away abruptly with the tissue balled up in her fist, knuckles white from tension.

“You’re not all right,” Eames said as the quiet started to ring in his ears.

“No, I’m not,” she said, more curtly than usual. There was a tension in her spine and a stiffness in Arthur’s carriage that made Eames guess as to the source of her recent sniffles. He pondered the wisdom of asking about it but was pre-empted by the sound of the back door opening with a low creak.

“It’s me,” a familiar raspy voice said, the words muffled slightly by the distance as the door swung shut. “Sorry I’m late.” Christian stepped through the doorway into the dusty showroom and the reasons for his lateness soon became obvious. He was still breathing hard, his long hair stuck to his face with sweat, and he sagged against a wall with a weary sigh.

“Christian, you’re – you – “ Ariadne’s voice faltered as she registered the blood spotting his face and the left sleeve of his jacket. She bit her lip then and then turned and retreated to the stockroom, shoulders shaking. Arthur passed her on the way out of the stockroom and shook his head in frustration as the back door slammed behind him.

“What happened to you?” he asked after Christian managed to catch his breath.

“Two of his bodyguards got suspicious. They tailed me, tried to take me down in an alley. Did not work.” Christian dropped his open messenger bag on the floor and shrugged his bloodstained jacket off, wiped the blood splatter off his face with it.

“You’re not hurt?” Eames asked. The only injury that he could see was a fresh graze that glowed vividly against his cheek. Arthur’s cellphone trilled then and he stepped back into the stockroom to answer the call.

“A few bruises and scratches. One of them tried to introduce me to a brick wall.” He rolled the sleeve of his shirt up to reveal the carbon-fiber socket of his prosthetic, stripped the glove off his right hand. The lifelike silicone of the cosmetic prosthetic that he had worn seemed unnaturally pink against the machined steel connector on the wrist joint.

“You lost them,” Arthur said. It was not a question. Suicidal or not, Eames knew that Christian was smart enough to not lead his pursuers back to a hideout, even a temporary one.

“More than that.” No more needed to be said. Christian unlocked the connector and pulled the cosmetic hand off, replaced it with the titanium Dorrance hook that he wore most of the time. His movements were smooth and practiced as he hooked the cable back up to the quick-lock on the harness he wore. “Ariadne is upset,” he said as he tested the cables, opening and closing the hook experimentally before he rolled his sleeve back down and buttoned the cuff back up.

“She’s only ever done corporate work,” Eames sighed and pulled out a Dunhill, flicked his lighter open. “I don’t think she’s used to people dying.”

“It feels to me like she is expecting _Ocean’s Eleven_ and getting – ” Christian took his left glove off and flexed his fingers, shrugged ruefully. “Us. Maybe I should try to talk with her.”

“Are you sure? I don’t know if she’s still angry about the last time,” Eames said. He took a long drag on his cigarette, ran his finger lightly across his neck to underscore his point.

“I think I should apologize for that, too. Besides, I know how hard she can hit. She has good teachers.” Christian picked his messenger bag back up and tried to stuff his bloodstained jacket in it, his good hand trembling from a mixture of exhaustion and leftover adrenaline.

“Well, don’t bollocks this up,” Eames said, a sudden taste of salt sharp in his nostrils and mouth as he realized just how tired Christian was. “You don’t want to scare her away.”

“No,” Christian said as he fastened the flap of his messenger bag and checked the front of his shirt for any missed bloodstains. If he had noticed Eames staring he had also chosen to ignore it. “She is much too nice for that.”

* * *

“Vladimir wants to see me,” Arthur said as he saw the both of them enter the stockroom. “Probably wants me reporting in on the hit.” Ariadne was nowhere to be seen, but Eames caught a glimpse of her in the alleyway outside – someone had propped the door open with a chunk of brick to let fresh air in. Probably Arthur, he thought. Arthur thought of everything.

“Do you want me to come along for translation?” Christian asked carefully. Vladimir’s English was accented but passable and Eames knew that Christian’s offer did not involve any kind of translation whatsoever. Non-survivable stab wounds overcame most language barriers.

“No.” Arthur checked the time on his watch, adjusted the holster in his right trouser pocket. “I don’t want him to think I need armed backup if I’m just reporting in. I’ll be taking Pandora, though.”

“Go ahead.” Eames let him take the MP5K in its briefcase, took the Vintorez from him in exchange. “That makes, what, four guns concealed on your person so far?” he asked.

“Four, yeah,” Arthur nodded, his eyes dark with some kind of worry.

It didn’t take a genius to guess what Arthur was worried about, and Eames was familiar enough with him that he knew no answer would be forthcoming unless he did some prompting of his own. “What happened with Ariadne?” he asked.

Arthur sighed, and when he spoke the words came slowly like droplets of blood from a scratch. “She’s – she’s not too happy with how I shot someone in front of his nine-year-old kid.”

“It’s cruel, but now he’s dead she might have a chance to grow up outside his world.” Christian murmured with a half-shrug as he checked the curved blade of his pruning knife for damage. _Is that what you wish had happened to you?_ Eames wondered silently.

“Look – be nice to Ari, okay?” Arthur said with a warning look in Christian’s direction. “I have to go before Vladimir decides to tell Nikolai I didn’t show.”

“Ari, eh?” Christian asked, pronouncing the word as though it were Finnish. A faint smile of genuine amusement was visible through the unruly hair drifting over his face.

Arthur shook his head and chuckled, and in that moment his neutral façade cracked with the crow’s feet around his eyes. Eames could not help but grin in response. “Don’t tease him, Chris.”

Christian let the smile drop from his face, suddenly respectful. “Don’t worry. I will treat her with kid gloves.”

Arthur nodded once in acknowledgement and left out the front door, leaving them alone in the stockroom.

* * *

They found Ariadne sitting on a low crate in the alley behind the stockroom, hunched over with her forearms resting on her thighs. Eames noted with a faint pride that her training had asserted itself even in the midst of an emotional crisis – she had retained enough presence of mind to put her jacket on over her holstered sidearm. Christian crossed over to sit on the ground beside the crate while Eames watched them from the back door. She wiped at her eyes with a wad of tissue paper and sniffed wordlessly as he settled himself to her left, his legs stretched gracelessly before him.

“What is it?” she asked him in a tear-choked voice.

“I’d ask you if you were okay,” he said, as he offered her a clean handkerchief – it looked like the one Petra had given him after his meeting with Nikolai, albeit after having been run through the laundry at least once – “but I think you would agree that it’s a stupid question at this point.”

“Yeah.” Ariadne smiled warily despite herself, and then burst into tears again. She made no move to pick up the handkerchief, and Christian had to get up on his knees and wipe the tears from her chin himself.

“It’s okay,” he said, and then froze as she wrapped her arms around his neck and cried quietly on his shoulder. _Help me,_ he mouthed silently at Eames as he patted her awkwardly on the back. Eames levered himself off the doorframe and took a step towards them, worried about how Christian was going to take this unexpected closeness. He had put a gentle hand on her shoulder when she started to talk, the words coming out in a choppy rush.

“I know you probably think I’m really stupid or just some kind of lightweight,” she said at last, her voice muffled slightly against Christian’s shoulder.

“Why would I think that?” Christian asked her, the tension in his spine easing a little as she let go of him. “You’re smarter than most people I know and you hit very hard.”

“I just can’t get over having to kill a man in front of his little girl,” Ariadne said wearily as she sagged back against the wall. “I know he’s probably all kinds of bastard but I can’t help but think we’re the same kind of bastards too.”

“That I am,” Christian murmured. He rocked back on his heels to get a little distance from her, steadied her with his left hand as he spoke again, “but I think maybe she won’t have to grow up thinking what he did was normal.”

“I know, but it’s still hard for me,” she said, fresh tears running down her cheeks. “Maybe I should have listened to Eames when he warned me in Paris.”

“Now you’ve said this where he can hear you he’s not going to let you forget that, you know,” Christian said with a wicked glance in his direction.

“It isn’t very often that I get to hear I’m right, you know,” Eames said, smiling as he heard Ariadne hiccup weakly as she tried not to laugh and cry at the same time.

“I mean, Arthur’s some kind of badass special operations type, you’re a former spy,” she said to Eames, “and you’re, uh – ” Her words trailed off as she tried to find a polite descriptor for Christian’s rather shady past.

“A hitman and cleaner,” Christian said simply as Ariadne remained silent and stared downwards, her fingers knotted together in her lap. “I don’t make any excuses for what I have done,” he said softly while he wiped the tears gently from her face. “My father decided to start me early and it’s what I’d known since I was nine.”

“Jesus,” she breathed softly as Eames squeezed gently on her shoulder. She looked up at him, her eyes riveted to his in horror and sympathy. “I guess that explains why you’re okay with all this stuff.”

“I am most emphatically not okay,” Christian said with a rueful shrug, “which brings me to my point.”

Ariadne nodded slowly then, as though digesting what she had just heard. “I’m sorry I hit you last week,” she said softly after a few moments of silence. “I was just so scared.”

“I’m sorry too. I’ve been alone so long I forget other people have feelings too.” Christian paused, glanced at Eames, who made an elaborate show of looking skyward, a cupped hand held over his brow. “What are you doing?”

“Looking for the flying pigs,” he said archly in a bid to disguise his relief. “I never thought I would live to hear you make any kind of apology.” This at least was true.

Christian’s reply was characteristically him, testy and just a little too straight-faced. “I have a knife, you know,” he said simply.

“I thought you were trying not to scare her.” Eames shrugged in mock innocence and smiled inwardly at the familiarity of that reply. It was the kind of thing he would say every time he wanted Eames out of his way in the kitchen.

“That would not scare her,” Christian said as he stood slowly and stiffly. “She talks about going after professors with a box cutter.”

Ariadne wiped at her cheek with the back of a hand, smiled weakly through her frown. “I probably shouldn’t be glad that you like my attitude, but –” She cut herself off, shook her head and looked up at Eames. “I’m not going to ask if we’re doing the right thing, because I don’t want to convince myself this is right. But we’re doing the best we can, right?”

Eames met her gaze; saw the trust beneath the doubt in those soft dark eyes. “Given the circumstances, I would say yes,” he said slowly as he stepped forward to help her up from her crouch. “That said, I’m not perfect. I could be wrong.”

“We all could be,” Christian murmured. His phone buzzed in his shirt pocket then, and he stepped back into the stockroom to answer the call. Ariadne watched him leave and then looked down at her hand in Eames’ own as though self-conscious at the contact.

“Are you feeling better?” he asked her as he let go of her hand.

“Some, yeah,” she said with a weak shrug as she glanced in the direction of the store’s back door and the stockroom beyond. “I guess the only thing I can do is keep going. Did you know all that about Christian? From before, I mean, with his dad.”

Eames shook his head a little sadly, let out a long exhalation that wanted to be a sigh. So much made sense now. “This is the first time I’ve heard that,” he said. “Now I understand why he never talked to me about his family.”

To his vague surprise Ariadne reached up and squeezed his bicep gently, echoing his own gesture from before. “Because he feels guilty?” she asked.

“Because he wants so badly to seem normal,” Eames murmured. It was all so obvious now, and he felt a stab of guilt somewhere beneath his diaphragm as he thought about their breakup three years ago. He wasn’t the kind of man who wanted to turn time back – that led to madness – but it didn’t stop him from kicking himself now that he realized how wrong he had been.

“Eames,” Ariadne said, loudly, and he looked down at her and realized he had missed her in his bitter reverie.

“Mm?”

“You can’t blame yourself for this, you understand,” she said with another squeeze at his arm. “Christian’s not exactly the most talkative guy on Earth and you can’t read minds.”

“There are some times I wish I could,” he said pensively, as he pondered Arthur’s own reserve. The problem with having a weakness for the silent type was having to guess constantly at what they were thinking when they felt like being uncommunicative, which was often, and in Christian’s case, almost a mathematical constant.

Ariadne shrugged, glanced up at him. “Yeah, but then you’d get bored because nobody would ever want to play poker with you again,” she said straight-faced, and he could not help but laugh from a mixture of amusement and embarrassment. Even now Ariadne was the most levelheaded person around and he could not help but feel a little ashamed at how he had been indulging in self-pity while she wrestled with being an accessory to murder.

* * *

The next few days passed in relative boredom punctuated with minor flurries of activity. Christian had, with a certain amount of back-and-forth with a discreet real estate agent, secured them some space in the shuttered clinic beside the dispensary that Yusuf and Petra had set up shop in. The arrangement would make the inevitable testing and dry runs more convenient and the examination rooms actually worked as passable bedrooms. Not that the pharmacy space was actually much use right now – Eames had yet to receive the data that his contact at Whitehall had promised to send, which meant that for the most part the chemists sat around hypothesizing various angles of attack instead of actually experimenting.

“I’m still billing you for this, you understand,” Petra had said during one of their afternoon meetings. “There’s other shit I could be doing.”

“Like what?” Yusuf asked her. “Drink bad beer and attend metal concerts?”

“That still counts as shit I could be doing besides hanging out with you, but then getting a root canal’s probably preferable to spending time with you,” she said with an insincere grin.

Arthur cleared his throat loudly from behind his Moleskine notebook, shutting both the chemists up. “In any case,” he said, “I’m going ahead with our plan whether or not you figure out a solution for the intrusions countermeasures, which means our top priority is getting out of our mark’s head mostly alive. The first issue I’ve identified is that kicks have to be set up ahead of time. In a setup like this we’re probably not going to get the time or space to do so. That rules out multiple dream levels.”

“There’s always the old standby of shooting ourselves, as long as we keep our realities straight.” Christian sat slouched in his chair, his legs stretched out under the table. He took a long pull on his premixed protein shake and made a slight face. “Is it just me or does this taste like liver? Strawberries should not taste _meaty_.” He frowned as Petra mouthed something in his direction – something that Eames did not catch but probably amounted to the Finnish or Russian equivalent of _big girl’s blouse._

“I’m not the one on four different psychiatric medications here,” Eames said before they could start throwing stationery at each other again. He wasn’t even sure if four was the right number here – he couldn’t remember how many prescriptions Christian had exactly.

“I’m crazy, but I’m not that crazy,” Christian said easily. “That is not a problem with me.”

Arthur made a note in his Moleskine. “Okay. So we haven’t got anything more elegant than shooting ourselves in the head. What about the IV protocol issue? Most of the time we run fast-and-loose with it in the field, but cross-contamination is a problem here.”

“I could mark a dedicated line for Christian’s use while we’re testing,” Petra said, “but there’s too much margin for fuckup in the field.” She pulled out her pack of Ziganovs and tucked one behind her left ear for later, gnawed on the lipstick-smudged end of her pencil stub instead.

“Two PASIV units,” Yusuf said with a slight shrug. “We slave one to the other with a hardware connection, the IV systems remain segregated. No chance for a contaminated needle-stick that way.”

“Is that doable?” Christian asked with a glance in Arthur’s direction. “You’re the hardware expert here.”

“Might have some slight lag-time on your end,” Arthur said after a few moments of thought, “but it’s negligible in a single-layer setup. Can you handle being a couple seconds behind everyone?”

“Back home we call that a hangover,” Christian said with his hair hanging over his face, his voice soft with amusement as he rolled one of his pill bottles around in his left hand.

“Cute,” Arthur said dryly. “Ariadne? You looked like you wanted to say something.”

“Okay. Tell me if I’m wrong, okay?” she asked. “Right now there’s no reliable way to tell whether or not someone’s had the IC used on them. If they haven’t, then the extraction goes on as normal, and if they have then we’re all in trouble.”

“Right,” Arthur nodded as he saw where she was headed.

“If we’re going in expecting a fight, we probably should all be armed to the teeth, but then I have to figure out a context where that won’t let the mark know he’s dreaming. People don’t walk down the street with grenade launchers. Not in most places, anyway,” she said with a quick glance in Eames’ direction.

“We could dream something up –” he started to say, and then stopped when he realized what she had been trying to say.

“Yeah, but if we change the dream too much the projections all automatically find us. No, if we’re going to have to bring an armory in I’m going to have to cache it, which means we’re going to brush up against suspension of disbelief if we have to start pulling it out. It’s kinda a catch-22.” That was not an angle Eames had thought of initially, and it impressed him. Ariadne really was going to be unstoppable if she decided to continue working in dreamshare after this.

“The weaponry problem would be an issue if we were going to set up an extraction as a regular business meeting, but –” Christian smiled nastily, sharp teeth glinting behind his messy hair. “Do you know how to plan a good bank robbery, Ariadne?”

“No,” she said doubtfully, unsure of where this conversation was going to lead.

His smile widened as he straightened up in his chair and leaned in towards her conspiratorially. “Well, would you like to learn how?” he asked.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song Christian picks for the countdown is the Jonna Tervomaa version of _[Rakkauden haudalla](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MR50dTJgEFg)_. Also, the temperature is in Celsius, not Fahrenheit because Eames thinks in Celsius and metric. The line about dysfunctional people having dysfunctional sex is a relic of my ENG 105 class when I was assigned _The Unbearable Lightness of Being._ As with previous instalments, words in  < > brackets denote conversation taking place in a language other than English that the POV character does in fact understand.

Late spring had given way to a brutal summer as they planned their first extraction on this mission, and short sleeves were now a survival mechanism in the stuffy confines of the clinic. The clinic building lacked air conditioning – a sensible response to the long winters at this latitude – but the fans they had dragged in were inadequate when faced with 37-degree days and ridiculous humidity.

For the most part Eames loafed around and smoked during the hottest parts of the day, rousing himself only for the odd burst of subterfuge, surveillance and observation. It was the only way he knew to handle such weather. The others handled it differently. Arthur soldiered on and found excuses to spend his days in air-conditioned archives and newspaper morgues. Petra simply started wearing less, and Ariadne wore her hair up and kept two large fans trained on her work desk constantly. It didn’t seem fair to Eames that Yusuf was completely unfazed by the heat and humidity, but then, he thought, at least he wasn’t Christian, who didn’t so much tan as much as burst into flame. Short sleeves were out of the question for him, and he tolerated the weather with a familiar sullen stoicism.

* * *

The first step in every extraction was finding a mark. Access to Woodruff was something they did not have, and so they had to work their way through his layers of connections and cutouts in the manner of a groundskeeper trimming a topiary maze. Snip this, prune that, and then take a left turn, repeat _ad nauseam._ This was the part of intelligence work that Eames hated the most. He was a people person, and he much preferred being turned loose to charm, flirt and inveigle his way into information he had no business knowing at all. Instead he cooled his heels and watched Christian draw Arthur a rough chart of the cartel and its organization, the movers and shakers and people who mattered. He propped a chessboard on the table before him, and recreated the 1858 casual between Morphy and Anderssen as he whispered the names to Arthur, who took down the information on an unlined sheet of paper.

* * *

Christian did not play chess except in the most casual sense – he attacked well but lacked a sense for the middle game in a game that was almost all middle game. Instead he used famous chess games as a mnemonic technique to help in the retrieval of information he had committed to memory. This was not something unique to him – Eames had seen various other extractors use similar schemes, and apocryphal rumor had attached algebraic chess notation to dreamshare operatives trained by the FSB. Miles had trained Cobb, Arthur and Mallorie in the ancient _ars moriendi_ – the method of loci that allowed them to walk back through their dreams and retrieve memories attached to the topography in their heads. Even now Arthur did not leave information in his Moleskine notebook – only directions through a place that existed only in his mind.

* * *

Eames’ own mnemonic training had come at the hands of an eccentric old fart at the SIS, a man known only to him as Browning. The old man had chosen his pseudonym for the venerable old pistol, and legend had it that every one of his range targets had only a single, rather ragged hole in the head. Not bad at seventy, Eames had thought then. In addition to making Eames’ life a living hell the old bastard had leveraged his training as a stage actor and taught him to tag information to his lines.

 _“That place, young man,” he had said, “that your lines come out of when you’re the character. When you’re, oh, Rosencrantz or Puck, or god forbid, Hamlet.”_

 _“I dropped out of the Royal Academy before they let me do Hamlet, actually.”_

 _“Of course you did, you bloody idiot. You can barely act, and I’m to make something of you. But those lines. When you feel they’re coming from within.”_

 _“Like I’m actually inventing them.”_

 _“Exactly. That is mostly your training telling you to get out of the bloody way and let your memory work. It’s fairly amazing, actually, what the mind is capable of once you train the fool in charge of it to shut up.”_

By the time Browning had been done with him he could recall the names of every English player who had participated in a winning Test match between England and Australia while also delivering the Porter’s monologue from Macbeth.

* * *

A pattern had started to emerge after Arthur had spent several days poking at Christian’s information with a ballpoint pen. Sergey ran his cartel like a business. He laundered a lot of his money by funneling capital into genuine startups and then reaping the dividends when his miners struck demantoid garnets in the Urals. That meant serious bookkeeping, which also meant some very good accounting. Arthur had zeroed in on the accountant almost immediately. He spent several days researching the stockholders on several of Sergey’s front companies, jumping up the corporate food chain as he traced the connections between one shell holding to another and followed the flow of money upstream.

“I think we have it,” Arthur said to the others in his makeshift waiting-room office as he pulled his horn-rimmed glasses off and massaged the bridge of his nose. “Somewhere down the line Sergey or one of his subordinates got lazy and had the same accountant handle the books for several of his subsidiaries.” Eames nodded more to himself than to Arthur. Every setup had a loophole or weak link somewhere. Laziness was a big one. He glanced over at the battered couch to see if Christian had moved in response to Arthur’s revelation, but he remained as he had been, stretched out on the couch with a fat, dog-eared paperback held to his nose. He had been out meeting some contacts the night before and had only returned in the late afternoon, and was probably still tired from his excursion.

“Do you think this accountant knows anything, or would they just handle the legal end of the books?” Ariadne asked as she got up from her own desk and fanned herself wearily with a scrap of cardboard. Several mazes sat unfinished on the tabletop – she had been working on each one serially as the glue dried on the others.

“Only one real way to find out.” Arthur said as he lifted his glass of cold water, took a sip and frowned. Most of the ice in the glass had melted and droplets of water ran down his knuckles to patter softly on the photocopies he had been looking at earlier.

Ariadne got up from her chair and picked up Arthur’s papers before they got wetter, put them aside before he could do so himself. “Are we still going to use the bank robbery setup for the extraction?”

“I don’t see why not,” Arthur said after he had sipped from his water glass again. “It’s unlikely that he’d risk the side effects to put the IC in his accountant’s head, but it’s still a good idea in case he’s been militarized and we could use a rehearsal."

“We’ll need a song for the countdown, then.” Eames got up from the office chair he had appropriated and beckoned to Arthur for the dossiers.

Ariadne frowned as she picked up the folders and handed them to him. “Isn’t Edith Piaf some kind of tradition?” she asked.

“Cobb used Edith Piaf because that was Mal’s favorite song.” Eames told her as he glanced at the highlighted lines on the blurry photocopies. “Usually the extractor gets to choose the song and it usually differs from job to job.”

“Which meant if Eames ran this one we’d be stuck with the Smiths or worse.” Arthur said with a brief shudder. "No offense, but _Girlfriend in a Coma_ is never an appropriate song for a countdown."

“You and your obsession with Morrissey,” Christian said mildly without looking up from the book he was reading. So he _had_ been paying attention – he was just being typically silent and Finnish, then. Eames could not help but grin when he remembered the look on Arthur’s face after the fifteenth repeat of _Hatful of Hollow_ during their drive from Poland to France several months earlier.

Ariadne shrugged, pulled the clip out of her loosening French twist and then did her hair up again. “Well, since you’re the extractor I suppose it’s going to be some kind of Nordic death metal.”

A wicked quicksilver grin flashed across Arthur’s face. “Or the Best of Queen,” he said, and Eames had to hide his laughter behind one of Arthur’s dossiers when he caught the reference. Christian put his book down to shoot him a look of vague disbelief and horror, and had been about to open his mouth to protest when Ariadne cut him off.

“Don’t you know any music you leave in a car turns into the Best of Queen after two weeks?” she said.

Christian’s stare was blank and uncomprehending. “This is some kind of inside joke.”

Ariadne crossed over to the couch, stared at him over the cover of his book. “Please tell me you’ve read _Good Omens._ Neil Gaiman. Terry Pratchett.”

“That would be a no,” he said as he went back to reading his novel. It was something in Russian from the Cyrillic print on the cover, but Eames was not close enough to pick it out.

“Have you been living under a rock all this time?” Ariadne asked him, aghast.

“This is Christian we’re talking about. He brings his own rock wherever he goes,” Eames said shortly before he had to duck when Christian sat up and threw his book across the room at him.

* * *

The book was still in the living room when Eames came back from dinner. Someone, presumably Arthur, had picked it up from the floor and left it on the couch where Christian had been sitting. Eames picked it up and leafed through it, smiled grimly at his lack of surprise when it turned out to be a copy of _Anna Karenina_ , heavily underlined and annotated with cross-references to a Milan Kundera novel. _Of course he reads books about dysfunctional people having dysfunctional sex,_ Eames thought, faintly amused.

* * *

Arthur spent the next two days digging up information on the accountant with Christian playing translator and go-between every time transactions had to be conducted in Russian. Various details emerged through their careful sifting. The accountant was too heavily guarded for any covert attempt at an extraction, which led Arthur to focus on his personal assistant, a striking brunette named Irina Alekseeva Sokolova. _Not a bad-looking woman, but not one I’d try to pick up,_ Eames thought as he glanced at the surveillance photographs that Christian had taken.

Arthur copied the photographs to the hard drive of his Toughbook and cropped them to a manageable size. The digital images were huge, but one generally got excellent resolution out of a Hasselblad 503CW equipped with a very good zoom lens. (The fact that Christian possessed a ten-thousand US dollar digital backplate for his camera did not shock Eames – the fact that his photography had gone digital in the past three years did.)

“There is something unusual about her involvement,” Christian said as he took the chair beside Arthur’s with one of Petra’s homemade smoothies in his hand. “The vory do not normally trust women in their business.”

“We know Sergey has a Harvard MBA. Could that have influenced his decision?” Arthur asked over the clicking of his mouse.

“A show of legitimacy, maybe. Her boss is a civilian accountant after all,” Eames suggested from his spot on the waiting room couch.

“Perhaps, if she does not know anything about her boss’ less-legal dealings, but then there is this.” Christian said as he tapped gently on the monitor of Arthur’s notebook computer with his hook prosthetic.

Eames stood up and joined them behind Arthur’s desk to glance at the image in question, but he was at a bad angle to get anything off the LCD screen. “What’s that?”

“That is our Irishka being escorted around after work by one of Sergey’s minders. That is Vasya. He is not a very nice man.” Christian pushed his chair back and stood up so Eames could get a better look at the picture. Vasily was good-looking enough to be an actor or athlete, but something was off. _Too much murder in his eyes,_ Eames thought as he glanced at the photograph. No visible tattoos, but that wasn’t always reliable – some of the lower-ranking mob soldiers didn’t sport much ink at all. Irina caught his eye, however. There was a certain authority in her body language that suggested a complete lack of intimidation – she was not frightened of the sixteen-stone mob enforcer at all. He exchanged a look with Arthur, who nodded wordlessly in confirmation.

They had their mark.

* * *

Christian could not insert himself into Sokolova’s life for any kind of observation – his handicap was too distinctive and Vasily knew him from before, and there wasn’t a friendly corporate mentor to help Eames weasel his way into the corporate food chain like he had on previous jobs in Sydney and Singapore. Instead he made a few phone calls and arranged for an extensive set of false credentials for Petra’s use. She dyed her hair back to a more reasonable shade of brown and took most of the piercings out of her face so she could spend her days working as a temp clerk in the accountancy office. Most chemists didn’t like working in the field at all, but Eames had worked with Petra before. She wasn’t as much of a genius with sedatives as Yusuf was, but she backed up her foul mouth and street chemistry with a decent knowledge of tradecraft and a .45.

* * *

Petra returned one evening with interesting news, most of it promising. Sokolova did not keep a Rolodex or a personal planner of any sort and most of her schedule was put together after careful surveillance and tailing.

“The reason you see Vasily hanging around her when he’s not on exec protect duty is because they’re dating,” Petra said as she massaged her sore feet after a day spent in heels. “It’s not a huge surprise, I guess. He’s pretty good-looking in a thuggish sort of way. Some women like that.” Yusuf handed her a glass of cold water and she accepted it with a small, grateful sigh.

Ariadne made a face at that. “I don’t know. He’s a little too dangerous for my tastes.”

Yusuf cleared his throat at that. “You spent several weeks living with Eames and Arthur, and you think he’s _too_ dangerous.”

“They’re not dangerous,” Ariadne said before she looked up from the work piled on her desk. “Wait. What am I saying? Of course they’re dangerous men, but they’re not the same kind Vasily is. I don’t even know how to articulate it.”

“What you mean to say is that we’re not potential serial killers,” Eames said as he looked over the photocopies Petra had brought back from her faux day job.

“Unlike me,” Christian said with the barest hint of a smile. He stood tall and narrow in the frame of the doorway as Arthur stepped past him into the waiting room.

“I just did a diagnostic on his PASIV,” Arthur said, nodding at the familiar battered camera bag Christian was carrying in his left hand. “The hardware’s compatible with mine, which means we can try a test-run with both units today.”

Christian unzipped the camera bag as Arthur spoke. “Shall we?” he rasped, and Ariadne got up and hauled Arthur’s aluminum briefcase out from under his desk. She popped the locks on the case, and set up the PASIV with quick, expert movements.

“Not bad,” Yusuf said. On the other side of the room Petra put on a pair of nitrile gloves and prepared to put Christian under.

“Arthur’s been teaching me,” Ariadne shrugged, and Arthur chuckled gently as he adjusted the settings on Christian’s PASIV unit.

* * *

Ariadne made a surprisingly good bank robber, and Eames wondered idly if it was a matter of personality or if this criminal streak was just something she had learned on exposure to the rest of the team. Probably the latter, he thought. Nobody present was a particularly good role model for any kind of impressionable young person. An argument could be made for Arthur until one remembered that he could slit a man’s throat so gently that he didn’t notice he was dead. They were individually and collectively a guidance counselor’s worst nightmare.

* * *

“What do you think?” Ariadne asked as she guided them through the bank she had planted in the middle of a very familiar cityscape. Her work was impressive as usual – this time she had leveraged St. Petersburg’s famous bascule bridges to create circuits and mazes through which she could reroute projections, thus buying more time for the team in a tense situation.

“Are you sure you don’t have a background in armed robbery or some other thing like grand larceny?” Yusuf asked as he looked under one of the teller stations at the silent alarm.

Arthur shrugged. “If she has it didn’t show up in her background check.”

“Not everything shows up on a background check,” Christian murmured absently a half-second later as he glanced at the dusty potted plants and looked up into the cold florescent lighting. Eames thought that he had finally become used to Christian’s disability, but down here he still had his right hand, and its sudden presence was a shocking reminder of everything he had used to be.

That detail had not escaped Arthur. “You know, I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am,” he said as they checked the doorway into the vault. Ariadne had turned it into a vicious bottleneck with a dogleg corner – hardly regulation for any kind of bank layout, but perfect for their purposes. Arthur could lurk here with his Benelli and turn anyone trying to round the corner into a messy imitation of haggis.

“That I’m not a cripple in dreams?” Christian dreamed a knife into his left hand, reversed the grip effortlessly and then switched hands to practice with his right. His smile seemed easy and natural for the first time since that one afternoon in Helsinki.

Arthur shrugged as he glanced into the empty vault. “I wouldn’t have said it like that, but yes.”

“It’s a phantom limb thing,” Christian explained. The knife vanished, as did his smile. “My brain still expects my hand to be there, so it’s there when I dream. I forget what my prosthesist calls it.”

“Proprioception?” Yusuf suggested.

“That.”

* * *

“I would not have thought that was possible,” Yusuf said during a busy moment as Christian suggested some layout changes to Ariadne with Arthur in close attendance.

“Me neither,” Eames said. He was intrigued by how easily Christian used his right hand, muscle memory intact even after all this time.

“It makes intellectual sense,” Yusuf mused. “His nervous system remembers what it is like to have both hands, so he has them both in lucid dreaming, but his psyche remembers the trauma of the loss…”

“He might actually be the first person I know with a foolproof way of telling the difference between dreams and reality – even his own dreams. Mal would have loved to see this,” She would probably have wanted to interview Christian had she lived, chased him around with a portable tape recorder until his Nordic reserve melted under her unrelenting Parisian charm.

Yusuf raised an eyebrow at the name, wiped the lenses of his glasses on the tail of his shirt. “You are talking about Cobb’s wife, Mallorie Miles the psychologist, yes?”

“Mrs. Cobb, yes.” Eames pushed the funeral out of his mind and replaced it with the first time he had met her and Cobb and Arthur. It had been 2002 and Arthur had just been casevaced from Afghanistan with a pair of crutches and a mangled right hip. He had smiled a little more back then despite the pain and the limp, but everything had changed the day Mal died.

“I read about the research she was working on before, well, you know.” Yusuf’s voice trailed off uneasily. “She was a brilliant woman,” he said after an uncomfortable silence.

“That she was.” Eames felt a vague ache bloom in his chest as he watched Arthur explain an alteration to Ariadne, saw that old smile return on his face.

The first strains of the countdown started playing then, a smoky female voice over gentle guitars, and then Eames was blinking himself awake on the lumpy waiting room couch with an IV cannula in his arm.

Petra fussed over Christian as she unhooked him from the PASIV and then held a wad of gauze over the punctures on the back of his left hand. “How was it this time?” she asked him. His liver problems meant that his somnacin dosage had to be very carefully tweaked – too much and he remained in a post-sedation twilight-state after waking, but too little and he wouldn’t go under.

“Better. No nausea this time.” He tolerated her touch while she taped the gauze pad in place and then swung his legs over the side of the lawn chair, tried to lever himself upright with a right hand that was no longer there.

Eames unhooked himself from the PASIV the rest of the team was using; the one that Arthur had built into a Zero Halliburton aluminum briefcase. A fat cable snaked from it to the other, smaller unit that Christian had brought for his own use.

The countdown song was still playing on the speakers on Arthur’s desk. Eames did not understand enough Finnish to parse the lyrics he was hearing, but he was fairly sure he recognized the word _kiitos_ in the lyrics – “thank you”.

“That isn’t metal music,” Ariadne said doubtfully. She sat up in her lawn chair and rubbed at her eyes, the gesture oddly childish.

“You’re not missing much,” Arthur said as he knelt down beside her and helped her with the IV line. “Everything sounds the same after it’s been slowed down enough.”

“Indeed.” Yusuf’s smile only got broader, his white teeth gleaming in the gloom of the workroom. “Even Justin Bieber.”

“What the hell does _that_ sound like?” Ariadne asked.

Yusuf shrugged. “Really weird New Age whale song.”

“You work with the strangest individuals sometimes, Yusuf,” Eames said. He checked that the bleeding had stopped and stood up, stretched the stiffness out of his spine.

“I know,” Yusuf said smugly. “That’s why I am stuck with you.”

Christian caught Eames’ eye from across the room and shook his head as though to say _he’s got you there._ Eames looked at the both of them, sighed in frustration and pondered the feasibility of leaving their hands in a bowl of warm water during a future testing session.

* * *

The next week lay fallow while Christian and Arthur worked on finding a way to access Irina without alerting Boris – her boss – or his bodyguards, Vasily included, which meant careful schedule juggling and some potential sabotage.

“Boris is going to be at one of Sergey’s parties in a week. Very exclusive,” Christian said during an impromptu meeting in the clinic’s waiting room. He had returned from one of his little gossip sessions with a faint smile on his face – one that would have been a smug grin on anyone else.

“Which means Irina’s not invited,” Eames said, raising a brow at the news. Christian smelled like an old ashtray today, which meant that whatever he had found out had been more important than his personal objections to smoking. Eames always thought that he was being a little hypocritical on that matter – in the eighteen months they had lived together he had done almost all the recreational drugs known to man at some time or another, but he also somehow considered smoking a disgusting habit.

“More than that,” Christian said as he sat down on the couch and stretched his long legs out. “She’ll probably be alone because Vasily’s obligated to show up and pay his respects.”

“What time does it start?” Arthur asked from his seat at his desk. “I’d rather catch her at work than at home. Neighbors,” he explained when Ariadne looked at him quizzically.

Christian looked up from his book. “You’re out of luck on that. It’s a late night party. She leaves work before it even starts.”

“Not necessarily,” Yusuf said as Christian leafed through the paperback in search of his bookmark. “We can engineer an excuse to have her stay at work. Petra won’t even need any kind of administrator access to make this happen – all we need is a rare earth magnet and a hard disk drive.”

“You’re not allowed around my laptop any more,” Arthur said as he made another note in his Moleskine notebook.

“I would never do that! I only borrow it to play Solitaire,” Yusuf protested with mock offense.

Arthur stopped writing, looked up from his notebook. “That explains the adult websites in the browser history,” he said mildly.

Christian cleared his throat politely as Ariadne stared in vague horror, and an awkward silence hung over the room until the look of confusion on Yusuf’s face made it clear that Arthur was joking.

* * *

Yusuf’s proposed sabotage went off without a hitch. Petra had entered Boris’ office to drop off some paperwork and contrived to spill the documents out of the folder. She then knelt down and palmed a magnet along the CPU tower of his computer as she picked the loose documents up. The meltdown had been immediate and Boris’ response predictable – he had simply delegated Irina to get computer technicians in to restore the data from backups and then left the office early.

 _Typical arsehole boss,_ Eames thought as he watched him leave the lobby, Vasily in tow. He then adjusted the glasses he was wearing as part of his computer technician disguise, flipped his false ID tag around to display his IT consultant credentials and stepped into the next lift upstairs.

Arthur stepped in when the doors slid open on the third floor, the PASIV unit in his right hand. He was wearing one of his summer-weight suits, the knot of his necktie loosened in a concession to the brutal summer heat. They stood in silence side-by-side until the doors shut again.

“You have everything,” Arthur said noncommittally as they resumed their slow journey to the offices on the twelfth floor.

Eames knew what he was referring to and nodded as his fingers brushed against the smooth plastic syringe in his left trouser pocket. “I do,” he said.

* * *

The plan was to have him slip into the office and delay the network repairs until the other employees had left. Irina was obligated to stay behind and oversee the work due to the sensitive nature of the data Eames would be working with. Once he and Petra were alone with Irina they could knock her out with a sedative and then perform the extraction. Petra had given him a capped syringe with a hair-fine needle before she had left for work that morning. “This should put Irina out for the time we’ll need to get the PASIV set up,” she had said with a casual shrug. “I don’t think you’re going to need to use it, but if the spiked tea doesn’t work –”

“I take over,” he said as he took the syringe from her. He thought briefly of putting it in the cheap leather bag he had bought for his IT consultant disguise but decided against it – better to have it at hand if he needed to use it. Instead he tucked it in an empty pocket.

“If you have to use it I’ll figure out an excuse when she comes to,” Petra said from behind the mirror on her powder compact, “Maybe suggest she see a doctor to make sure she isn’t anemic. This should work its way out of her system quickly so it shouldn’t show on toxicology screens, and the needle’s so fine she shouldn’t even bleed.”

Eames knew enough street chemistry to know that the syringe probably contained GHB or a close equivalent – extractors tended to go through the shadier ends of pharmaceutical supply. “Did you compound this?” he asked.

“Hah. No, Yusuf did.” Petra blotted at her lipstick with a tissue and mock-frowned. “Guess I shouldn’t let him take me out to dinner."

“Not unless you have your own food taster,” he quipped, and they shared a brief, cynical laugh at that. “Seriously, I know the bloke. He would never use professional knowledge for anything more than professional reasons, and he makes a killer curry.”

“He’s just a big old teddy bear, isn’t he?” she asked.

Eames had shrugged, amused at the mental image. “I wouldn’t say it like that."

“Just because he’s cuddly doesn’t mean he doesn’t have teeth,” Petra said as she stepped out the door.

* * *

The office receptionist gave his forged IT pass a cursory glance and buzzed him in. Somewhere in the city the real on-call IT consultant was spending the wad of Euros Christian had slipped him several days ago.

Irina was even more striking in person than she had been in the surveillance photographs – the pale blue irises of her eyes were ringed with a thin line of black, and her pale complexion was almost white in the harsh fluorescent lighting.

<“You’re not the usual man,”> she had said as Eames stepped into Boris’ office and flashed his passcard. He waited for her to object but she stepped aside from the doorway to let him in. <“Oh, what does it matter – anyone’s more competent than that idiot,”> she sighed.

Eames put his leather laptop bag on Boris’ desk and pulled out a brand new laptop – Arthur had spent some time carefully aging it so it looked used. <“You think it’s a dead hard drive?”> A stack of software manuals followed, all of them carefully dog-eared and scuffed, their spines cracked in the right places.

<“Probably,”> she said with a small shrug. <“You’ve got an interesting accent.”>

<“I’m actually English,”> he said, leavening his cover story with a little truth. <“Followed the cellular phone boom to Helsinki, was made redundant, wound up working in Vyborg and then got made redundant again, got hired here.”>

“Well, your Russian is very literate,” Irina said, switching to perfect, unaccented English.

“Thank you,” he said. “I’ll get a diagnostic started and see what we’ll need to do from here.” He squinted at the screen of his laptop to disguise his vague unease. He hadn’t taken her for some kind of fool – most personal assistants tended to be fairly competent individuals, but her awareness was subtly worrying. If she had been sharp enough to notice his accent now then it was more likely that she would realize she was dreaming in the middle of their extraction. There was a soft throat-clearing near the doorframe, and the both of them looked up to find Petra, holding a stack of folders under her left arm and a cup of tea in her right. <“I’d have knocked but my hands are full. Here’s your tea,”> she said.

<“Thank you,”> Irina said as she took the teacup from Petra and put it down on Boris’ desk. “Do you want that one?” she asked Eames. “I can get another.

His mouth went dry and he felt his pulse skip slightly as he scrambled for an excuse. “No thank you. Liquids and hardware don’t mix.” He was suddenly very conscious of the weight of his USP compact in the pocket holster of his khakis.

“They wouldn’t, would they?” Irina picked the cup back up and glanced at Petra, who was lingering nervously in Boris’ office. <“I know the IT guy is cute, but we don’t pay you to stand around and stare. Ask for his number when you’re off the clock.”>  
<“I’ll get back to work.”> Petra said as she retreated in the direction of the photocopy machine.

“I will be in my office if you need me for anything,” Irina said as she collected her teacup. “It’s the one next door, to the left.” Eames nodded obediently and let out a silent breath of relief as he saw her back vanish through the office doorway.

* * *

Eames spent a tense fifteen minutes pretending to run hardware diagnostics on his laptop while he waited for the rest of the office staff to leave work. The silence from Irina’s office was a good sign – he could only hope she had actually finished her drugged tea after she had left instead of leaving it to turn cold on one side of her desk – Petra’s surveillance had told them that she was the kind of workaholic who had to be asked to go home on a day like this.

He had glanced at his watch for the third time when he heard Petra hissing quietly at him from the doorway. “She’s out,” she said. “The others are here.”

Boris’ office chair creaked softly as he stood up and stuffed his laptop and computer manuals carelessly in his messenger bag as Arthur came in to join them. “How did it go?” he asked.

Petra sighed as she took Eames’ bag and stepped aside to let him out. “She had the manners to offer him her cup of tea. Scared the fuck out of me.”

“She’s sharp,” Eames murmured as they stepped into Irina’s office. She sat slumped in her chair with her head resting on an arm, as though she had fallen asleep in the middle of a stack of paperwork – which she had, thanks to the sedatives in her tea.

“Sharper than I thought. We’re going to have to be very careful on this one.”

“You don’t usually underestimate people unless you’re too busy checking them out,” Arthur said as he crouched down to roll Irina’s sleeve up.

“Not even then,” Christian said quietly from his side of the room, where he was busy setting up his PASIV unit as Ariadne worked on Arthur’s.

“Could have fooled me then,” Arthur said with a sigh as he swabbed Irina’s wrist with an alcohol-soaked swab and hooked her up to the PASIV. Several retorts flitted before Eames’ consciousness as he rolled his own sleeve up and pushed his watchband out of the way, but he decided that discretion was the better part of valor. The IV cannula was a familiar sting by now, and he felt the carpet scrape at the heel of his palm as he sat down with his back to the wall.

“Fifteen minutes?” Petra murmured as she helped Christian with his IV line.

“Unless something goes wrong,” Arthur said. He sat down beside Irina’s office chair and set up his own IV line expertly, put the tether around his wrist. “You’re armed?” he asked, almost as an afterthought.

“Every minute of my day,” Petra said as she reached out to activate Arthur’s PASIV unit. “See you all topside.”

* * *

Eames blinked and found himself standing with his hands held up in surrender. His glasses started to slide down the nose of his new face, but he stayed in character and did not push them up. The smell of gunpowder hung in the air – another one of Ariadne’s little touches – and he risked a sideways glance through his peripheral vision at Arthur, sleek as an eel in a winter-weight Zegna despite the Benelli he carried on a quick-release sling. Christian paced deliberately several feet away, his open trench coat whispering softly in the air as he passed by the other two hostages – Ariadne and Irina, of course – with a G3K in his arms.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Arthur hissed, and Eames swallowed hard and feigned a shudder as he felt the muzzle of Arthur’s Glock brush against the base of his skull. On cue Christian slipped his finger in the trigger guard of his rifle and turned the barrel on Ariadne, who curled up to hug her knees in a creditable display of terror.

“Their lives are in your hands,” Arthur continued reasonably as Eames shuffled towards the door leading to the vault. “You open the vault, we get what we want, and we leave.” He had put his hand on the door handle when there was a crunch and a yelp from Ariadne’s direction. Arthur frowned and seized Eames by the collar with his off-hand, pushed him against a convenient wall to discourage heroics. Things were already starting to deviate from the script. Christian wasn’t supposed to start roughing Irina up unless they needed to put pressure on her.

Eames let the glasses fall from his face, felt his heart lurch as he registered the scene before him and understood the reason for the violence. Irina had curled up on the floor, her face white with pain as Christian stood with his heel on her right hand, the contents of her purse scattered on the floor. A pocket pistol – a Makarov – gleamed dully against the institutional carpet, just out of her reach.

“How did you get hold of this, I wonder?” Christian hissed as he took his foot off her hand so he could pick the Makarov up. “Got a boyfriend in the black markets?”

“This is an inside job, isn’t it?” Irina gasped, as he bound her wrists together with electrical tape. “Why else did she warn you when I drew?”

“I’m the one asking the questions here. Why do you have a gun?” Christian had shown remarkable restraint considering the situation – Irina’s hand was bruised and had started to swell, but he had not stepped down hard enough to break any bones.

Irina blinked to clear the tears from her eyes, and then looked up at Christian again. A long, shaky breath escaped her lips before she spoke again. “I understand now,” she said, “This isn’t a robbery. This is an _extraction._ ” A series of sharp _cracks_ rang in the air outside as rifle rounds crazed the bulletproof glass on the door and outside windows.

* * *

Ariadne knocked Irina out with a syringe full of veterinary tranquilizers as Eames dropped his bank manager disguise and drew his own USP Compact. “I’m sorry I tipped her off,” she said as they scrambled backwards towards the security of the vault.

Christian shrugged the apology off as he propped Irina against the hallway and joined Arthur at its entrance. “It was that or let her shoot me.”

Ariadne did not answer him – she was too busy covering Arthur with her Skyph as he took cover behind the corner. “A hard choice, I’m sure,” Eames managed as the first projections came through the waiting room. He unlocked the vault with Ariadne’s code sequence, yanked the heavy door outwards as Arthur dropped one projection after another with cold precision.

“Keep that up and I won’t bother watching your back,” Christian shouted over the report of his G3.

“That’s fine. I have Ariadne and Arthur for that.” Eames holstered his sidearm and picked up the fat manila folder on the floor of the empty vault, flipped the cover open.

“Maybe you two should continue your foreplay after the job is done.” Arthur was terse, the line of his shoulders tense under the expensive wool of his suit jacket.

“Jealous?” Christian purred.

Arthur shook his head, changed the subject as he reloaded the Benelli during a lull in the shooting. “She recognized you, didn’t she?”

“If she did, I don’t know how,” Christian murmured, his voice barely audible against the ringing in their ears.

“I think I do,” Eames hissed as he speed-read the contents of the folder. He could feel a headache building behind his temples and at the back of his neck as he parsed the typewritten Cyrillic. “I’m starting to understand how things just went to shite here.”

“How?” Arthur asked. He edged the barrel of his Benelli around the dogleg corner in the hallway and fired twice, but Eames was no longer looking at what he was shooting at.

Instead he tore one of the sheets out of the folder and held it out to the others. “Irina’s a mole,” he said for Arthur’s benefit as Christian took it and scanned its contents. “She’s infiltrating the _vory_ on behalf of the FSB.”

“Goddamnit.” Christian crumpled the cheap photocopy into a ball and dropped it on the floor. “The spring of cunt and the midwinter of cock.”

Ariadne stopped mid-reload to raise a brow at his creative use of profanity. “You’re going to have to teach me how to say that in Finnish.”

Christian stopped swearing and stared at her in vague horror as he realized that she understood everything he had said. “We’re dreaming, remember?” she reminded him with false cheerfulness, “No language barrier in here.”

“God help me,” he sighed, and then went on shooting.

A few high-velocity rifle rounds punched through the wall, dangerously close to Arthur as he ducked back into cover. “Eames. How much more do you have to memorize?” Arthur asked.

“It doesn’t matter.” Ariadne said flatly as she glanced back in Eames’ direction. She was pale and taut with stress as she put a fresh magazine in her Skyph.

“What?” Christian looked up from the sights of his G3 and at the ceiling as the room lurched ominously.

“She’s right. It doesn’t matter any more.” Eames said as he threw the useless folder aside – its contents now obliterated with heavy black lines – and drew his USP, held it to his own head. Irina lay on the floor beside him, blood leaking slowly from the bullet wound above her left eye. “One of those stray shots got her. She's probably awake by now”

* * *

Eames woke up to the smell of gunsmoke and a dull, growing realization that Irina was gone from her office chair. Petra held her 1911 left-handed as blood seeped through the right sleeve of her blouse to patter wetly onto the carpet at her feet. A quick glance showed him that the team was alone for now. _Not for long,_ he thought as he pulled the cannula out of his wrist and got up.

“What happened to you?” he asked Petra as he held his clean, folded handkerchief over the wound in her arm, tied it in place with his necktie. The others started to stir, one by one, as he worked.

“Irina woke up before the timer went off,” Petra said. She trembled a little from shock and pain but remained standing as Eames let go of her. “I drew, but she winged me before I could aim and ran for it.”

“FSB sub-security,” Arthur said tersely as he stood up and let his IV line reel back into the PASIV. “The projections always go for the mark so they wake up before the extraction team can.” He frowned and checked his watch. “We need to leave before security gets here.” He shrugged his suit jacket off and draped it over Petra’s shoulders to hide her bloodstained blouse from view, and then glanced backward at Ariadne.

“I’ll be fine,” she said as she helped Christian with his IV line. “You get Petra out of here first.”

Christian tried to say something then, frowned and cleared his throat. “Assume it’s unsafe to go back to the pharmacy. We’ll meet at our backup.” His voice was hoarser than usual, fuzzy from the abrupt shift between dream and wakefulness.

Petra hesitated, stopped as Arthur started to nudge her towards the office door. “What about Yusuf?” she asked.

Eames pulled out his smartphone and punched in a text message. “He’s been warned,” he said. Arthur did not give Petra time to reply – he simply bundled her out of the office with his hand braced carefully across her back.

* * *

Christian and Ariadne were the next to leave, and Eames kept a careful eye on them as they descended the stairs, making their ways separately to the first floor. A lift was a deathtrap in a situation like this, and the PASIV units they were both carrying marked them as convenient targets to those in the know. Eames had been in worse situations before but he could not remember when – at least most of the time getting shot in his business meant waking back up. All bets were off this time, and he cursed Cobb, Cobol Engineering, and various three-letter agencies under his breath as he climbed down the stairs with his pulse ringing in his ears.

They were halfway to the sixth floor landing when Eames heard a brief shout, and then his hearing ceased to work as a gunshot echoed in the narrow stairwell. He registered two more gunshots more by muzzle flash than sound, and swore noiselessly to himself as he swung over the railing to the stairs half a floor below.

He dropped down in time to see that two of Sergey’s men had cornered Ariadne by one of the landings, reached for his USP as she drew her Skyph and aimed in one smooth movement. She put two bullets in the first man and then shot him between the eyes when that failed to slow him down.

His partner flinched at the gunshots but kept advancing, knife in hand, and Eames was lining up a shot on him when he looked up as though baffled, and then dropped bonelessly to the floor. One of Christian’s knives jutted from between his shoulder blades, a little left of center, and Christian stepped back into the stairwell a moment later.

“Nice throw,” Eames told him as he bent down to collect his knife.

“I heard the shots,” Christian said by way of explanation. “Are you hurt?”

“No,” Ariadne whispered numbly as she reholstered her Skyph, her eyes riveted on the blood dripping steadily down the concrete steps. Eames scooped up Arthur’s PASIV with his left hand and threw his right arm around her narrow shoulders. She trembled like a baby bird against him, and her skin was cold and clammy through her clothing.

“Don’t look,” he whispered into her hair. “Don’t think about it. Just move.” Her feet moved automatically as he pulled her in his wake, and she leaned white-faced against him and shut her eyes to the carnage as they walked.

* * *

The backup safehouse was one of Christian’s boltholes – this one a small flat above a small photography studio. It wasn’t nearly large enough to hold the entire team comfortably, but comfort was the last thing on Eames’ mind as he stood in the narrow stairwell and waited for Arthur to let them in.

“Christian told me what happened,” Arthur said as he stepped aside to let them in.

“How’s Petra?” Ariadne asked softly. It was the first thing she had said in the half-hour since they had left the office building, and Eames could still feel her shivering against him.

“She’s fine.” Arthur took her right hand and then held her tightly enough that Eames could see the strain in his shoulders. “Yusuf stitched her up and gave her some painkillers,” he said after a long while. Ariadne nodded slowly in reply and then started to cry against Arthur’s shoulder. He herded her gently towards one of the bedrooms and Eames retreated into the kitchen with a slick, sick feeling in the pit of his belly.

He sat heavily at the kitchen table and watched sullenly as Christian poured some tea, shoved one of the mugs across the table at him. “The British cure-all,” he said.

“Not for this,” Eames said but he accepted the mug anyway. He watched as Christian laid his knives out on the dinette table and checked their blades for damage. The setting was familiar – almost comforting except for the emotional minefield that stood between them now. They sat sipping their tea in weary silence until Arthur came into the kitchen several minutes later.

“How’s Ariadne doing?” Eames asked him.

“Not great. I made her lie down, but it looks like she’s going to cry herself to sleep.” Arthur picked up an empty mug from the odd collection on the kitchen counter and sighed as he took in the scene at the table, his eyes lingering on the small knife collection before them. “This probably sounds strange, but I’d feel better if she were more angry with me.”

“Give her some time,” Christian said. He frowned at the chip on the point of his _puukko_ – the traditional Finnish belt-knife – and sighed as he put it back on the table. “She has a lot to process.”

Arthur nodded as he filled his mug. “I’m going to see if she wants some tea,” he said, taking the teapot with him as he left. Eames said nothing and kept his eyes on his mug of tea until Arthur had left.

“You’re jealous,” Christian said, after Arthur was safely out of earshot. “I’ve noticed the way you look at Arthur. Why don’t you ask him if he’s interested?”

 _If he’s noticed this means I’m being entirely too obvious about this_ , Eames thought. He took a long sip of the bitter, scalding tea and then sighed. “He’s rather obviously interested in Ariadne, in case you haven’t noticed."

“This is the twenty-first century,” Christian said blandly, completely straight-faced except for the wicked gleam in his eyes. “It’s not as though you’re a stranger to threesomes.”

Eames put his mug back down and tried to muster a proper amount of indignation. “So not only are you suggesting that I proposition a co-worker in the middle of a job, but you’re suggesting I scandalize our architect by offering to shag her too.”

Christian shrugged, took a sip of his own tea for punctuation. “She is a very nice girl,” he said, “but she is not that kind of innocent. Besides, I’ve noticed the way she looks at you.”

Eames sighed again. “You’re just bloody wishful thinking,” he said. “Next you’ll be telling me that Sherlock Holmes and Watson are – ” A knock on the door interrupted him, and he sat upright in his chair, glanced at Christian. _Are you expecting anyone?_ the look said.

Christian shook his head minutely and picked up his pruning knife, flicked it open. The knock came again, heavy and measured, and Eames frowned as he stood up and drew his USP Compact. Someone coming here to kill them would not bother knocking, he thought. He headed back towards the living room, Christian shadowing him as he did, and opened the door a crack.

<”Yes?”> he asked, half-expecting something farcial; a door-to-door salesman or the like. Instead he caught a sliver of a face – cold green eyes and a familiar patrician nose that he had glimpsed once in a dog-eared, yellowing photograph – and the warmth of the tea fled his gut as he realized who he was looking at.

“I’m here to talk to my boy,” Khristofor Soloviev told him, in perfect, unaccented English.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As with previous instalments, words in < > brackets denote conversations taking place in a language other than English that the POV character does in fact understand.

Eames’ experiences of family reunions did not extend to armed standoffs, and he started to wish they had when Christian flicked the blade of his pruning knife open and pointed it at his father. _Pity Gran was always such a pacifist,_ he thought as he took the scene in. Some of his relatives could have done with a good stabbing, perhaps even a glassing with a broken teacup.

“I’m not armed,” Khristofor said as he shut the door behind him and stared his son down despite the curved blade pointed in his face. 

“No, but the legman you’ve left outside certainly would be.” Eames said. There was no way he would have come alone. Not if he had any kind of sense. 

“A typical precaution in this business,” Khristofor shrugged. His English was better than Christian’s, but then Christian’s English had been better before his forced retirement three years ago. 

“You’re dead,” Christian’s voice sank to a choked whisper, and tears of rage started to spill down his face. “You’re supposed to be dead.”

“Well.” Eames holstered his USP and took a deep breath. “Then unless your father is the Son of God he’s got a little explaining to do.”

“I buried you, _Pappa._ ” The point of Christian’s knife wavered, but his gaze did not.

“Things are not always as they seem,” his father said with infuriating calmness, and Eames only had seconds to act when he realized Christian really was going to stab his own father. He reached into his pocket for Petra’s syringe and popped its cover off, jabbed him in the bicep through the thin sleeve of his t-shirt.

“I can’t let you do that,” Eames said as Christian turned on him and then wobbled before he could complete the motion.

“Why?” Christian whispered even as the knife slipped out of his grasp to clatter on the linoleum floor, and Eames caught him easily as he folded.

“He can’t kill you now, but I very well might.” That was Arthur, from the other side of the living room, and Eames picked Christian’s knife up and secured it before he turned to look. Arthur was standing in front of the bedroom door, with his Glock drawn. He held it at his side, but Eames knew he could aim and fire in a split-second if he had to.

Khristofor shrugged easily and held his empty hands up. “I’m here only to talk. To you, if he won’t.”

“Fine,” Arthur holstered his Glock and stepped away from the bedroom door. “We’ll talk in the kitchen.”

Eames watched the both of them vanish into the kitchen and thought for a minute before he decided where to put Christian.

* * *

“What’s happening outside?” Ariadne asked as Eames carried Christian into the room Arthur had placed her in. “Arthur told me to stay here.” She was still pale, her eyes reddened from crying, but her gaze was intense and alert.

“We’re fine for now, pet,” Eames said as he dropped Christian on the bed that Ariadne had vacated in the last minute. “Christian’s dad just wants to talk.”

“Christian’s father?” Ariadne stared in the direction Arthur had gone, her gaze hard and intent, as though willpower could bore through the door that Eames had shut behind him. “Have I missed something?”

“I think we all have.” Eames shrugged, sighed as he pondered his options. It would be better if Christian didn’t wake alone, but Eames wanted to keep an eye on Arthur and back him up if necessary.

Ariadne picked up her holstered Skyph from the nightstand and hesitated before she put the holster back on her belt. “Do you need me out there with you?”

Eames shook his head. “Right now I think it’d be better if you stayed here and kept an eye on Chris. I’d ask Petra, but – ” He went through Christian’s pockets and made sure they were empty, confiscated the CZ RAMI he had in an ankle holster while he was at it. Christian would be livid when he woke, and Eames didn’t want him to kill anyone or hurt himself when that happened. At least Ariadne was completely unthreatening and it was incredibly unlikely that Christian would ever harm her even at his worst. “He was on the verge of patricide when I knocked him out. He’ll probably be confused and rather upset when he wakes.”

Ariadne tugged the tail of her t-shirt down over her sidearm as Eames put Christian’s pill bottles down on the nightstand where her Skyph had been. “Will he be okay?” she asked, her voice soft and weary as she sat down on the other side of the bed.

“Make sure he takes his medication when he wakes up.” Eames paused, and then removed Christian’s belt and tugged his boots off for good measure, took them with him as he turned to leave the room.

“Good luck with your father-in-law,” Ariadne said. She reached out and pushed Christian’s hair out of his face with a wary deliberation that made Eames think of a child patting a lion, albeit one that had been tranquilized for some kind of veterinary procedure.

“At this point I’m glad we didn’t go for that civil union back when,” Eames sighed as he pushed the door open, hesitated and turned back to glance at Ariadne.

“We’ll be okay,” she told him. She took out her smartphone and fired up a video game as she settled down to wait, and he nodded and shut the door behind him.

* * *

The ensuing discussion reminded Eames of badly cooked Sunday dinners; half-truths slid around like overcooked slices of lamb on a platter. It was uncanny how Christian looked like his father – _Big Chris and Little Chris,_ Eames thought absurdly as he took a seat in the kitchen opposite the man who had nearly become his father-in-law. Christian was taller, his eyes and natural hair color subtly darker, but it was otherwise like looking at the same man in photographs taken decades apart.

“So why the Lazarus act, eh?” Eames asked Khristofor, felt that cold green gaze brush up against him like an icy hand as they studied each other like caged predators, each unwilling to give ground. Arthur had exercised his usual caution and cleared Christian’s knives off the table before he had suggested the kitchen as a makeshift conference room.

“I did it for much the same reason you no longer go by your birth name,” Khristofor said calmly. Eames kept his expression carefully neutral despite the sudden spike of rage flaring behind his heart. _No wonder he never talks about his family._

Arthur cleared his throat, broke the silence as he pushed his chair back. “You said you were here to talk,” he said. “I’m fairly surprised we haven’t been murdered for edging in on someone else’s turf if they’re pulling someone of your weight class as a go-between.”

“Not just anybody’s territory, you understand,” Khristofor said. “I had been watching your activities, but I chose not to interfere until you infringed on official jurisdiction.”

There was a soft rustle, a crackle of stiff paper as he pulled a folded envelope out of his jacket and slid it across the table. The fat envelope was warm under Eames’ touch as he opened it with Christian’s pruning knife and pulled a sheaf of papers out.

“What you’re saying is that we’re infringing upon _your_ official jurisdiction,” Arthur said mildly as Eames’ glanced at the papers in his hands, felt his jaw tighten as he recognized the documents Whitehall had promised him weeks ago. He did not realize how tight his grip was until he heard the paper crackle softly in his hands. Arthur glanced up at him, expression opaque, and he calmed himself with an effort of will, forced his hands to loosen up on the sheaf of paper. The tamper-proof seals on the envelope had been intact until he had slit the envelope, but all bets were off now that actual intelligence agencies were involved.

“All right,” Eames said. “You have us in a position where we have to listen, so talk. I assume there’s something you want.” Christian’s folded pruning knife was surprisingly dense in his hand, its weight and balance reassuring under his touch.

Khristofor chose not to notice the knife, and when he spoke the tone of his voice was mild, as though he had been discussing the weather. “Your recent activities have stirred up quite the hornet’s nest,” he said. “I understand that your eventual goal is to trace the origins of a certain transfer of technology.”

“I take it that you want us to stop what we’re doing,” Arthur offered, the next line in a script that nobody would admit to following, but an important one nevertheless.

“On the contrary – your presence has flushed certain elements out of hiding, and that is something we can take advantage of.” And there it came, the offer they could not afford to refuse.

Arthur caught Eames’ eye across the table – the next move was his. “We,” he said, according to script. “You’re proposing some kind of alliance."

“A temporary one, of course. Unofficial, until the crisis is resolved to our satisfaction.” Khristofor was hard to read, but Eames caught the stiffness in his posture and the slight aversion of his gaze as he spoke. _He’s as worried about this as we are,_ he realized.

Eames’ pulse jittered in his throat and chest even as he kept his face and body language carefully neutral. Time to turn the cards over, he thought. “Let’s not mince words,” he said. “You’re as concerned about the intrusions countermeasures as we are, and that’s why we’re having this civilized little chat as opposed to something cruder.”

Animation leaked back into Khristofor’s face as he shifted back in his chair, let his professional demeanor ease minutely. “I believe you’ll both agree that it benefits no one if there isn’t a dreamshare scene left to work in, officially or not,” He hesitated – the most vulnerable Eames had seen him in these few minutes, and sighed. “Besides, there is the matter of my wayward son and his failing health.”

“With all due respect, sir? Good luck with that,” Arthur said carefully.

“Thank you. He is ever stubborn, no?” Khristofor said, his smile slow and sad, and when he spoke again Eames could hear the pride and bitterness warring in his heart.  
“He doesn’t have to die like this. I could get him into an experimental treatment program, but I know he would never accept anything from me now.”

“I could talk to him if you’d like,” Eames said. “I can’t guarantee he’ll listen.” 

“Oh, he won’t, but I thank you for it anyway.” Khristofor shrugged. His crooked smile fit badly on his face, as though he had been out of practice doing it. He straightened up in his chair then, and it creaked softly under his weight as he slid a smaller, folded envelope across the table to Arthur. “I cannot discuss this matter for long. I’m supposed to be in Moscow right now. In here are emergency contact details with a handler in case you run into trouble before I return. Meanwhile I suggest you cover your tracks and wait a few days.”  
Arthur put the envelope in his shirt pocket without looking at its contents. “What about the operation Irina was on?” he asked.

“Nobody witnessed the failed extraction, and at this point Boris has assumed that she has been kidnapped by a rival faction. No doubt Sergey will want reprisals if he figures out that Nikolai has been backing you, but I am sure your deal covers this sort of thing, _neh?_ ” Khristofor stood up then, the crack of his knees sharp against the scrape of his chairlegs. “Take care of my stupid boy for me,” he said to Eames. They watched him let himself out of the apartment and then rose from their own seats in mutual agreement. Eames crossed to the clouded kitchen windows and glanced out at the car park across the street for several long minutes, until he was sure Khristofor and his helpers had left.

Arthur secured the flat, the bolts clicking loudly in the door deadbolt and then came back into the kitchen with a loud sigh. “What are you going to do now?” he asked Eames as he sat back down at the table and hauled his Toughbook out of its bag.

“Do what I promised to do,” Eames shrugged as he studied the empty car park for a moment more, and then sat back down at the table and poured himself a cold cup of tea.

“Try to talk to Christian?” Arthur turned his laptop on and then squirmed in his seat, pulled his backup Glock out of his pocket and laid it down in easy reach.

“I’m obliged to try,” Eames said, wincing faintly at his first bitter sip of the stewed tea. “What about you?”

“Firstly, I’m going to assume that we’ve been compromised, even if we aren’t. Secondly, I try to figure out how Khristofor got his intel.” Arthur’s laptop beeped quietly as it booted up, and then greeted him with its usual Windows chord.

“How he knew to be here instead of Moscow?” Eames hesitated, and then drained the teacup, ignoring the taste.

“Among other things,” Arthur said as his fingers tapped away at his keyboard.

“Vladimir.” Eames emptied the teapot into the sink, left his teacup there as well.

“You think he’s a mole?” Arthur asked almost-absently. No doubt he had already guessed, but better to let Khristofor know their suspicions in case the flat was bugged, which it probably was.

“We report directly to him, and he reports directly to Nikolai,” Eames said for the benefit of any remote listeners. “There isn’t any room for a leak unless they’ve gotten sloppy on things, and former regime personnel do not generally live very long after getting sloppy.” _Do you hear that, you old bastard?_ Eames thought to himself as he left Arthur to his work, _I can play this game as well as you, and Arthur is better._

* * *

Eames wasn’t entirely prepared for what greeted him when he poked his head into the spare room. Christian and Ariadne were sitting on the bed, huddled together conspiratorially with their backs to the headboard. Eames reached instinctively into his trouser pocket and ran his fingers across the poker chip he carried on him, tested its balance and blinked when he realized that he really was watching Christian play _Angry Birds_ on Ariadne’s smartphone.

Ariadne looked up from the screen as he entered the room. “How did things go?” she asked.

Eames pulled a Dunhill from the pack in his shirt pocket and tapped it out, stilled his shaking hands with an effort of will. His nerves were utterly shot. “Not as badly as I had expected.” He glanced at Christian, who remained pointedly silent as a tiny, high-pitched _wheee_ squeaked tinnily from the speakers of Ariadne’s phone, followed by the sound of splintering wood.

Ariadne looked back down at the game and assessed the results of his last play. “You want to aim a little lower,” she told him before she swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up. “You’ll be okay for now, right?”

Christian nodded wordlessly in reply, his expression unreadable beneath the fringe of hair that he had let fall over his face. The gesture was punctuated with another crunch as Ariadne crossed the floor, shooed Eames outside and then shut the door behind her. 

“Why are we talking out here? ” Eames managed to say before she cut him off.

“Because Christian isn’t ready for this,” she said, and then sighed heavily. Her shoulders sagged as the fight bled out of her slight frame, and Eames had to remind himself that she was still struggling with having killed someone scant hours ago.

“Was he – difficult or anything?” Eames asked as he ushered her towards the ancient lumpy sofa in the living room and sat down in an armchair that smelled strongly of cats and stale tea. The upholstery zinged softly against his shoulders as he pulled out his lighter, flicked it open and lit his cigarette.

“You’d be difficult too if you found out that everything you had believed for the past ten years was a lie,” she said as she sat down crosslegged on the right end of the sofa, “But no, he was okay, pretty well-behaved once I explained the situation. Took his meds like I told him to.”

Eames tried to imagine his own reaction to betrayal of that magnitude but could not. In hindsight he found it slightly miraculous that Christian had not drawn his sidearm and shot his father then and there. “How about you? How are you coping?” he asked after he took a long drag on his cigarette.

“I don’t know. I’m not happy with what I had to do, but at least I’m alive to be unhappy about it.” Ariadne’s mouth twisted sharply then, and she fell silent, looked down at her clasped hands.

“You know I’m here if I need to talk,” Eames said, and she looked up then, her eyes fierce and bright with tears.

“Look. Eames,” she said, after a long, shaky breath, “I know you want to try and fix things for me and make everything better, but you can’t. This is my issue to deal with. Either I get used to the idea of killing in self-defense, or I decide it’s too much and I turn back, but you can’t take this responsibility upon yourself. And the same goes for Christian. I know you’re still looking for closure with him, but you’re going to have to let his therapy work before you go in looking, otherwise you’re just going to hurt each other the way you both used to, all over again.”

_How does she know so much?_ Eames kept his misgivings behind his blank poker-playing face. “How much did Chris tell you?” he asked.

“About you? Nothing, actually.” Ariadne looked briefly away as though embarrassed before she spoke again. “I guessed, mostly,” she said, “You identifying with Heathcliff in _Wuthering Heights._ The way you acted that evening in Helsinki.” She shrugged. “I don’t know. Am I wrong about that?”

“No, you’re –“ he paused mid-sentence, too weary to dissemble, and let the mask drop. “You’re right,” he sighed.

“So what do we do now?” she asked.

Eames took a long drag on his Dunhill and exhaled, capped the stream of smoke with a smoke ring instead of sighing again like he had wanted to. Ariadne didn’t seem as trusting as she had been before – a good thing no matter how much it stung personally, because it improved her chances of survival in the extraction world. “The same thing we were planning on doing all along, except with a few extra steps. Big Chris is going to send us a handler, we turn some of the cards face up, and then figure out what our intelligence has in common.”

“Christian warned me not to trust his dad,” Ariadne said after a brief, thoughtful moment.

_No surprise there,_ Eames thought. “I wouldn’t trust him further than I could piss, but that isn’t what we’re dealing with here.”

“What is it, then?” she asked slowly, but he could see from the darkness in her gaze that she had guessed his answer already.

“Desperation, Ariadne. The FSB are going to be as fucked as we are if this thing gets loose, if it hasn’t already."

She nodded thoughtfully at his answer and let out a tired, shaky breath before she spoke again. “I guess I’m going to have to take Christian up on his offer, then.”

“What offer?” Eames got a vague feeling that he was not going to like her answer.

“He wants to teach me knife-fighting,” she said before she got up and went into the kitchen to talk to Arthur.

* * *

Christian was still playing _Angry Birds_ when Eames poked his head into the spare bedroom to return him his knife and sidearm. “I’m sorry,” he said as he laid them on top of the blanket in the indentation where Ariadne had been sitting. Christian stabbed at the screen with his index finger and put the game on pause as a tremor rippled through his frame, and then vanished abruptly.

“Thank you,” he said very softly, as though he did not trust his voice. He had his hair hanging over his face again so nobody could read his expression. “The rest of my knives are in the kitchen?”

“Arthur put them in one of the empty drawers.” Eames shrugged as he pinched out his cigarette butt belatedly, its heat a tiny bright pain between thumb and forefinger. “He didn’t want your dad to get the wrong idea.”

Christian froze in mid-movement, his left hand poised over the nightstand as he was putting Ariadne’s phone down. “What did he have to say?”

“He didn’t say it in as many words but I think he’s as worried about this leak as we are, and –” Eames kept a careful eye on Christian’s movements, suddenly aware of the awful intensity of his gaze.

Christian glanced at Eames’ face as he finished putting the phone down and then swung his long legs over the side of bed, making no move to reclaim his knife and gun. “And?”

_He wants me to know he’s trying to not lose it,_ Eames thought as he considered the words. “He says you don’t have to die like this. There are treatment options for your liver.”

“You can tell him to fuck off,” Christian’s shoulders slumped as he rested his elbows on his knees. “There is no way he doesn’t know the ribvarin therapy didn’t work on me. His offer probably involves killing someone for their liver.”

_You’re probably right,_ Eames thought but did not say. “What if it doesn’t?” he asked instead.

“I don’t know,” Christian said simply. “I’d have to figure out what I’d do with a life first.”

* * *

The next two days passed in a blend of fading terror and increasing tedium as the team moved back into the dispensary and the chemists went back to work after Christian and Arthur had swept the building for bugs. The building was miraculously clean, which made Eames wonder about Big Chris’ motivations. He didn’t doubt that the old spook loved his son, albeit in a completely dysfunctional sort of way, but it didn’t seem a solid enough reason to back the team clandestinely, not with the risks they were running. The simplest answer was, unfortunately, the one with the worst possible outcome – that the intrusions countermeasures were as terrifying as he had feared, and that the FSB was as worried about this as they were, which was an unsettling thought and one he tried not to dwell on for too long.

* * *

“I’d wonder what kind of fucked-up mind comes up with something like this in the first place,” Petra volunteered one afternoon in the laboratory as she flipped through a pharmaceutical textbook one-handed, “except I probably already know.”

“Too much like someone you know?” Yusuf took a new index card from the pile sitting on the benchtop and put down a few notes in his crabbed handwriting.

“Too much like me,” Petra muttered darkly from the other side of the laboratory. She had been moody ever since the botched extraction – not that Eames could blame her – but Big Chris’ reappearance seemed to upset her as much as it had Christian. Yusuf met Eames’ curious gaze and shrugged vaguely. _No, I don’t know,_ his look said, _and I’m not stupid enough to ask her about it._

“Maybe you should consider taking some of those pills, Petra,” Eames tried to say soothingly. She had refused all painkillers since Yusuf had stitched her up, which probably accounted for some of this uncharacteristic gloom. Muffled shouts echoed from the waiting room, but it was just Ariadne sparring with Arthur.

“I can’t drink vodka if I’m on painkillers,” Petra sniffed. She pulled a lipstick-smudged pencil stub out from behind her ear with her left hand, transferred it to her right hand (currently sticking out of a sling and propped on the bench-top) and then left a few more notes on an index card that she had plucked from Yusuf’s pile.

“The kind of vodka you drink, that’s a good side effect. That shite tastes like turpentine,” Yusuf said.

Petra dropped the pencil stub and flicked the index card across the table to him. “Puts hair on your chest,” she said, deadpan.

“I have enough hair on my chest.” Yusuf said as he reached up to his shirtfront and mimed ripping the garment off in Austin Powers fashion.

Eames fought a laugh at that. “Do that and I’ll have to report you to HR for sexual harassment.”

“We don’t have a HR department here,” Yusuf protested.

“No, that’s what Arthur’s for,” Eames said archly. A faint relief spilled through him as Petra laughed briefly and then went poker-faced again as she remembered her bad mood.

There was a polite cough and Eames turned to find Arthur watching them from the doorway. “Now I know why my ears are burning,” he said as he stood with his hands in his pockets. Eames wondered how long he had been there.

“You’re not sufficiently Messianic for it to be a sin. Taking your name in vain, I mean,” Eames said as he crossed the room to join him. “Although you know, some people do believe that calling upon the Devil does summon his presence.”

Arthur refused to rise to the bait. “Big Chris’ handler called to set up a meeting,” he said, all business. “I thought you’d want to know.”

“Actually, yes, thank you.” Eames realized he could still hear shouts and thumps from the waiting room. “Wait. If you’re here, who is Ariadne sparring with?”

“That’s the other thing I wanted to talk to you about,” Arthur said.

Eames shrugged. “I recall Ariadne saying Christian wanted to teach her to knife-fight. I didn’t think you’d have an issue with it.”

“Oh, I don’t, but you’re going to have to see this,” Arthur nodded down the hallway at the source of the noise, and Eames followed, his curiosity piqued.

* * *

Both Christian and Ariadne were wearing oversized white t-shirts that were covered in alarming streaks and splotches – but what made up those marks was definitely not blood unless they bled green and blue. A sweetish chemical smell hung in the air, and Eames noticed that Christian had decided to dispense with the practice blades and had used marker pens in this sparring session instead. _Good idea,_ he thought. The ink marks made it easier to track notional injuries in a mock-fight, and more importantly, Ariadne would quickly learn that nobody came out of a proper knife fight unscratched. She bore most of the marker lines in dots and streaks down her forearms, the front of her t-shirt and against her throat. Christian was covered in similar lines – several crossing over each other just under his jaw against his carotid artery, what looked to be a stab upwards under the ribcage aiming for the liver, and a random collection of blue lines on the outside of his left hand.

“I do hope these are temporary,” Eames said as he stepped into the waiting room.

“Actually, I forgot to check,” Christian said with a nasty smile as Ariadne put her own marker down on her now-empty desk.

“I hope you’re just joking or I’m going to shoot you.” Ariadne frowned and studied her reflection in a compact she pulled out of her purse, rubbed at one of the ink lines experimentally with her free hand.

“They’re temporary,” Arthur said after a quick glance at the marker she had left on her desk. “These are just the dry-erase markers I bought for the whiteboard in the lab."

“We can talk about the anatomy later,” Christian murmured after he tugged his practice t-shirt over his head. “Right now I’m going to get a drink. Do you want some water, too?”

“Sure. That’d be good,” Ariadne said. She watched Christian retreat towards the small pantry and then sighed heavily. “And I thought killing someone with a gun was hard.”

“It’s a lot more personal, isn’t it?” Eames asked as he squeezed her shoulder briefly and found it taut from tension and nerves. “Relax, love.”

Ariadne let out a long sigh but did not relax. “I mean, we were just practicing with markers, but every time I went at him I was horribly conscious that this is a real breathing person I’m trying my best to stab the life out of. And it’s not like knife fights are these clean, neat kills like you see in video games.” She held up her hatch-marked arm for emphasis. “If the person you’re stabbing wants to fight, they can put up a hell of a fight before they get too tired or bleed out from their defensive injuries. I thought I could take care of myself after you two kicked my ass from one end of the Seine to the other, but this is something else.”

Something flitted across Arthur’s gaze briefly. “Good thing I had to interrupt your lesson, then. Christian’s dad called,” he said. “He’s still busy but he’s bullied someone into running handler for us.”

“Bullied?” Ariadne asked doubtfully.

Eames shrugged. “Intelligence services are like any other bureaucracy in the world, Ariadne. Everyone wants something done, nobody wants to actually volunteer the staff and funding to do it, and the resulting management turf war and paperwork is always a nightmare.”

* * *

Big Chris’ handler made contact some time after sundown, first with a coded text message, and then a staccato series of knocks on the dispensary’s back door, carefully spaced to spell out the day of the month plus four in Morse code. The password had been Arthur’s idea, his tradecraft impeccable as usual. The date was something anyone could know, but the integer added or subtracted changed on a daily basis, which meant it was effectively impossible to falsify the password without inside information. Christian answered the door with his usual caution, stepped back from the doorway as though surprised, and then raised an eyebrow as he turned to glance at the team through the hallway.

His surprise started to make sense when Eames registered the soft tones of a woman’s voice – a familiar one at that – as their contact spoke to Chris. She stepped into the doorway and was briefly silhouetted, and Eames knew her even before the door swung shut behind her.   
“Good evening,” Irina Alekseeva said as she stepped out into the half-light with Christian behind her. She seemed infuriatingly calm for someone returning to a room full of professional dream thieves who had recently failed to invade her mind. Eames saw Ariadne stiffen minutely in her seat but the gesture was one of suspicion rather than surprise.

“I’m frankly a little surprised that you’re here.” Arthur said mildly. Eames noticed that he had risen from his seat automatically and wagered that it was caution, rather than politeness, that had led him to do so. Irina looked very different from the polished personal assistant she had been less than a week ago. The professional skirt suit and heels were gone, replaced with sneakers, jeans and a surplus camouflage jacket, and her shoulder-length hair was now boy-short and bleached until it was almost white.

“That I’m your handler, or that I’m willing to come back in here after I put a bullet hole in one of your people?” she asked as she accepted the seat Christian pulled out for her.

“Both, really,” Eames said before Arthur could answer.

“Well.” She shrugged. “I’m currently not on active assignment, which means my direct superiors can spare me for this. That and they don’t listen to my objections when they send me into the field, which explains why I’m here.” Her candor was calculated to disarm, as was her dry good humor.

“Doesn’t Boris need watching?” Christian asked, too quietly. He had taken the seat to her right, his chair pushed back from the table for ostensible legroom, but Eames noted that he had seated himself with his good hand towards her in case she tried something.

“He’s not going to be a problem for very much longer.” She laid her large handbag on the tabletop and pulled its flap open carefully to reveal a slightly dog-eared manila envelope. Eames remembered the Makarov she had pulled in the dream and the bullet hole in Petra’s arm when they had woken up, after. _She’s not carrying her sidearm in that handbag,_ he thought, _Shoulder carry under the jacket. Round in the chamber, hammer down and safety on._ “My superiors are fairly invested in the idea that you stay alive,” she continued as she slid the envelope across the table, waiting for either Eames or Arthur to pick it up.

“I doubt so,” Arthur murmured dryly as he picked the envelope up, slit it open with a small penknife. “We’re not even on your official payroll.”

“I can’t explain how they think,” Irina shrugged, “I’m just doing my job. Also, you can tell your girlfriend to put her gun down now.”

Eames glanced instantly at Ariadne, who held her empty hands up with a vague air of confusion. Christian cleared his throat, nodded towards the laboratory door behind Eames, and he registered that Petra had drawn her 1911 from the holster she had sewn into the sling supporting her wounded arm. “Just making sure,” Petra said as Eames turned to look at her, “And I’m not his girlfriend. He isn’t that lucky.”

“I’m sure we’re all the worse for it,” Arthur said drily once Petra had reholstered her sidearm, “Except for Yusuf, of course.”

“In your dreams, and his, too,” Petra said before she stepped back into the laboratory and shut the door behind her, and Eames could not help but notice that her ears had started to turn a delicate red in the moments before her retreat.

“What I just gave you is something I didn’t know about until yesterday,” Irina said after Petra had left. “I am not a dreamshare operative.”

_Bloody obvious, that,_ Eames thought in reply. Her subconscious militarization had been so thorough that she would never be able to suppress her projections even if she had wanted to, which meant that any attempt at shared lucid dreaming would end very much like their failed extraction had – in her mind tearing the artificial dream apart one way or another.

“I don’t think your departmental assignment has anything to do with this,” Arthur said as he pulled a sheaf of photocopies out of the folder, handed the rest of the papers to Eames. “The bureaucratic left hand rarely knows what the bureaucratic right hand is doing.”

“Perhaps, but this is something even Dr. Stephen Miles might not care for you to know,” Irina said drily with a sharp glance in Ariadne’s direction. Ariadne’s expression shifted slightly in response, and Eames glimpsed something cold and hard under the girlish softness of her face, something not unlike the soft _tck_ of a gun’s safety being flipped off. He started to understand why as he read the grainy photocopies Arthur had handed over to him, some of them copies of documents old enough that they had pin marks in the upper left corners from before the KGB had started to use staples.

* * *

Eames had been involved in shared dreaming since its early days, since the turn of the millennium. No doubt there were others who had racked up more sleep-hours than him. Arthur definitely; Dominic and Mallorie too, but they too were part of the early dreamers, the first group assembled to push the boundaries of the subconscious. During that time he had always accepted that there were things he would never find out about how dreamshare itself came into being but now the truth (or part of it, at least) was being laid out before him in grainy typewritten Cyrillic that made him think, perversely enough, of lepidopterists and dead butterflies in glass-fronted cases. It was the biographical data, he thought – lives and their attendant messiness dissected with a callousness that even he found shocking.

* * *

_INES reports little to no advantage to interrogations enhanced with somnacin_ , one fragment read, _despite the drug’s efficacy as a hypnotic. Its ability to induce lucid dreams remains irrelevant to actual interrogative use,_ Eames read in a heavily redacted photocopy dating back to the late 70s. _Its real benefits are in the inducement of_ zerzetzung, it continued, _as the dreams it creates are so vivid that they confuse the boundary between sleep and reality_. This particular document itself came from the East German archives and had been translated into Russian in longhand between lines of typewritten German. _Zerzetzung_ had been translated literally as “corrosion”, but Eames knew it better as gaslighting, subtle and prolonged psychological manipulations meant to make a target question their own sanity.

* * *

_INES is becoming harder to control,_ a later excerpt read. _Her cancer diagnosis is making her more reckless and less susceptible to threats, and the British have renewed their efforts to contact her. I recommend we increase our surveillance and revoke her clearance._

* * *

_Surveillance request approved. Clearance revocation request denied,_ the follow-up read, _we are on the verge of a breakthrough and cannot risk alienating the doctor until we know for sure that her research has borne fruit. For now we will inquire if Moscow will counter-offer with radiation therapy and a spa holiday after the project terminates._

* * *

A later, undated telegram was photocopied whole in its code language – shipments lost overboard in a summer squall in the Mediterranean Sea. A terse memo deciphered the message for Eames, that a Dr. Ute Mühlbach had gone missing after a supposed car accident on the way home from work, that no body had been found in the wreck, and that rival intelligence services had performed a snatch-and-grab. The translation itself was dated 1986 – _The beginning of the end,_ Eames thought, just four years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Eames turned the page and swore softly when a grainy surveillance photo of Doktor Mühlbach resolved itself into a face he recognized. His mind added the crows’ feet and the gray in her hair on reflex.

“Dr. Irene Cameron,” Eames whispered just under his breath.

_“Kuka?”_ Christian asked, “Who?” he added in English.

“The Stasi’s INES – Doktor Mühlbach is Dr. Irene Cameron,” Eames said. He tore the sheet of paper off the sheaf that he had been reading, laid it down on the table in front of him. “I worked with her once, back when I took the Queen’s shilling.”

“She defected after the British promised to put her cancer in remission,” Irina said coolly, “Which they did in 1987, after a radical mastectomy and several months of chemotherapy. By the time the truth came out everyone was kind of busy with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Union.” She waggled her fingers in a vaguely embarrassed way, shrugged as though she were personally responsible for her predecessors’ failings, surveillance-wise.

“Is she the former co-worker you said was unaccounted for?” Ariadne asked, very softly, “Back in Helsinki, I mean?”

Eames looked down at the photograph, at Irene’s face – he could not think of her as Ute Mühlbach, despite the truth – at the defiance in her stare and the set of her chin, tried to imagine facing a cancer diagnosis and grasping at any chance to live. “I’m afraid so,” he murmured, long seconds after Ariadne’s question.

“There’s a letter here, from Professor Miles to someone named Irene. Dr. Cameron. It dates back to the fall of’88.” Ariadne said. “I think he was in love with her.”

“That was shortly before he divorced Dr. Marie David,” Irina said simply, “Irreconcilable differences. There should be copies of the paperwork in that folder.”

“Mal was about fourteen when it happened, which would have made it –” Arthur paused then, did a brief mental calculation, “–1989.” _Too brief,_ Eames thought, his gut filled with an odd, inexplicable fury. _Mallorie’s been dead two years. How long has he been carrying that around in his head?_

Ariadne squinted at another photocopy, sighed softly as she did. “Twenty years of marriage gone like that. I hope Cameron was worth it.”

“Love usually is,” Christian shrugged ruefully. “The morning afterwards not so much.”

_“Christian,”_ Ariadne said, smiling despite her mock-exasperation.

* * *

Eames managed to corner Arthur in the clinic’s tiny pantry when they broke for coffee. “You’re not over Mal, and I don’t think you ever were,” he said without preamble, watched for a reaction.

Arthur’s hands remained steady – too steady – as he reached for the coffee pot. A drop of hot coffee splashed onto the back of his hand as he filled his paper cup, spotted his shirt cuff with tiny brown dots, but he remained silent.

“You’re still thinking about her,” Eames continued, choosing his words for maximum emotional impact, “it took you less than a second to remember how old she was when her parents were divorced. This isn’t the kind of thing platonic best friends talk about while getting pedicures at the spa. Is this why you’ve been holding the world at arm’s length?”

“That’s none of your goddamned business.” Arthur gripped the handle of the coffee pot tightly enough that his knuckles turned the color of old ice. “You told me back in Singapore that it wouldn’t be a problem if I turned you down.”

“I’m a big boy, but this really isn’t about me,” Eames lied, his heart lurching in his chest as he did, “Ariadne likes you – she really does, and I’m going to take you to the bloody cleaners if you treat her as a substitute for Mallorie.” That much, at least, was true.  
Arthur sagged minutely, and Eames watched him, waited as he took a sip of hot coffee.

“I don’t want to,” he said after a long, tired sigh. “That’s why I’ve been – holding her at arm’s length, like you said. I want to be sure I’m not just looking for a replacement goldfish.”

“I don’t know if you trust me well enough for it,” Eames said as he put a tea bag in his own paper cup, poured some hot water in, “but I can keep an eye out if you want, you know, if you need help with objectivity.”

“Eames, I –” Doubt flitted across Arthur’s dark eyes, faded. “I don’t want to put you in a difficult situation, but thanks,” he said awkwardly after another sip of coffee.

“It can’t be more difficult than watching you not deal with your issues,” Eames said as he stirred sugar into his tea, “God. I keep wanting to reach in your head and _push_ until you sort your shite out.”

“Physician, heal thyself,” Arthur murmured into his coffee cup.

“Is that not the bloody truth,” Eames sighed, and then looked up when he heard a soft throat-clearing sound at the pantry door. Christian stood half in the doorway as though he had been peeking in to make sure no indiscretions happened on his watch – _Bloody unlikely,_ Eames thought. Christian was more likely to have documented any indiscretion for future blackmail than anything else.

“I’m sorry to interrupt your foreplay but –” Christian hesitated, his voice faltering before he could complete the jibe, and he waited until Arthur waved him on. “My father has called from Moscow, and I would rather not talk to him. Irina is stalling him until one of you gets there."

“Right.” Arthur put his half-empty coffee cup down. “Lead on, Macduff.”

“Lay on. It’s _‘Lay on, Macduff,’_ ” Eames groused softly as they left.


End file.
